In Defense of Dominoes

Tags

Cold War, England, Southeast Asia, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, Wall Street Journal, World War II

This is the thirty-fourth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

At the end of January, the Wall St. Journal ran an editorial written by author and former National Security Council staff-member, William Lloyd Stearman. The subject of his article was how America’s active participation in the Vietnam War, while not saving South Vietnam as a nation, likely saved the region from communism. The article is titled, America Lost Vietnam but Saved Southeast Asia, and is likely behind a paywall for you.

He makes a number of interesting points which, despite my immersion in books from the period, hadn’t quite occurred to me in just this way.

First off, he suggests that it was Vietnam that brought the United States into World War II. More than a year before Pearl Harbor (the article actually has a mistaken date for the events in question), Japan had demanded military transit rights in French Indochina. The French acquiesced to their demands after rapidly surrendering under the threat of Japanese military invasion. Ultimately Vichy France, under Axis diplomatic pressure, turned over the whole of Indochina, making it a Japanese protectorate. President Roosevelt quickly announced sanctions which froze Japanese financial assets in America. The British and the Dutch followed, within days, with similar policies. Says Stearman, it was this act by the United States which convinced Japan that the U.S. would, in the end, use its fleet to block Japanese expansion in the region. In an effort to preempt an American attack, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The author then continues on to talk about the effects that America’s active involvement had in South East Asia, possibly saving Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia from communist takeovers. The U.S. ramp-up, he says, inspired British intervention in Malaysia and Indonesia. Similarly, Suharto may not have fought the Chinese-backed coup, which took place in Indonesia on September 30th, 1965, had he not witnessed the actions of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Had that coup in Indonesia succeeded, it is likely that the Philippines would have been destabilized by their own communist insurgents. Given that the U.S. had a long standing defense agreement with the Philippines, and that a civil war there would have likely triggered that agreement, this would have begun a U.S. involvement on an even larger scale than the one in Vietnam. At least, so opines Stearman.

He also draws one more controversial conclusion about the Vietnam War. He says that contrary to popular opinion, which generally declares that the Vietnam War was unwinnable no matter the U.S. strategy, North Vietnamese sources acknowledge a path to American and South Vietnamese victory. This line of thinking says that, had the U.S. and ARVN blocked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, particularly through Laos, the communists in South Vietnam would have been denied critical supplies and reinforcements. In fact, the North Vietnamese did not understand why Washington did not authorize such an action, particularly as everyone knew that the “neutrality” of Laos had already been violated by the communists.

This jives with one of Moore’s points at the end of We Were Soldiers…, although in his case he is talking more about the pursuit of combatants into Cambodia and Laos as opposed to preemptive disruption of the inbound troops and supplies. Of course, Stearman doesn’t address the counter-argument that extending the war into Laos would have either turned domestic opinion against the war or, perhaps worse, caused the conflict to spill well outside of Vietnam’s borders and across the Cold War -embroiled globe.

This discussion of Britain, Malaysia, and Indonesia prompted me to pop open a Steel Panthers scenario, called Operation Claret, that deals with British Fighting in Malaysia and Indonesia. It models an encounter between British special forces and Indonesian Marines which took place in October, 1965 as part of England’s secret operation across the border into Indonesia during the Indonesia/Malaysian hostilities of the mid-1960s.

Defending the bridge.

This is a different kind of scenario altogether. The British, the preferred side for a player versus the AI, are on the defensive. They start in possession of all the victory locations but with insufficient forces to hold them. In the fight that is modeled, the British must cover their withdrawal across the international border back into Malaysia.

My game ended up in a draw, perhaps due to some confusion about how the scenario should be played. The British forces are insufficient to hold all of the the victory locations. Further, the victory point tallying overemphasizes losses on the British side, meaning it is even more important to give ground so as to reduce your own casualties. At the same time, the British teams are unusually effective, often neutralizing multiple Indonesian units in a single turn. This might be the most effective I’ve ever seen units in Steel Panthers and, I can only assume because I didn’t try to look it up, must be due to a mismatch between unit quality in this scenario.

Point being, what looked like initially a very strange scenario due to its very low unit count actually did turn out to be an interesting exercise for this game engine.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Going forward, you can return with me to the speculative scenarios in Squad Battles and Men of Valor.

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Blood for Oil

Tags

England, Jebel Akhdar rebellion, Middle East, Steel Panthers, WinSPMBT

I took a step back in time from my Vietnam scenarios and played a British action whereby they involved themselves in a Middle East crisis in the late 50s. While the U.S. may have inherited the Vietnam mess from the French, it was the British that had long experience in intervening in internal disputes within the third world.

From its foundation as a British protectorate in 1892, the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman had experienced conflict between the coastal and inland tribes. Inland Oman practices a form of Islam unique to the region that, actually, predates the Shia and Sunni denominations of that religion. In 1920, in order to quell the conflict within the Sultanate, the Imam of Oman was granted substantial autonomy from the coastal government. For 34 years, this resulted in relative peace.

Starting in 1954, a complex conflict caused the Imamate of Oman to rebel against the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, instigated by disputes over oil drilling rights. The Imam was backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt while Britain supported the Sultanate. From late 1957 through all of 1958, rebel forces were isolated on the mountain Jebel Akhar, unable to extend their reach but also unable to be dislodged.  A Steel Panthers scenario, The Height of Battle, depicts the final assault by British SAS forces against the mountaintop fortifications.

The British sense of humor attempts to capture Objective Beercan.

This scenario has some unique features. Of course the antagonists are forces we haven’t played before, with British Special Forces taking on Arab tribal rebels. The nature of the fight is also reminiscent of the Hill 43 fight in Squad Battles. At least I think so. I failed pretty miserably in my assault which, in real life, involved very minor losses from the British side. The scenario scored me with a minor defeat but, given that I was unable to take control of the stronghold or destroy the Omani weapons cache, I would consider it a complete failure. The way I interpret this scenario is that a head-on fight is not going to be feasible. The British player must find a way to use the quirks of the terrain and smoke shells to turn this battle to his advantage.

Despite suffering losses, I retained hope that I might eke out a victory. That is, until the Camel Patrol made its appearance.

I think success, as in The Battle for Hill 43 would involved finding protected approaches up the up the hill (can you tell that’s a mountaintop in the screenshots?) to allow closing with the enemy while avoiding fire during the approach. The shabby UI of Steel Panthers prevents easy navigation of protected paths up the hills. By way of contrast, Squad Battles allows a shaded UI effect to easily see lines-of-sight for both friendly and enemy forces, just by clicking. It didn’t seem worth figuring this out in Steel Panthers.

 

Come a Little Bit Closer

Tags

Cold War, Neil Young, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

This is the thirty-second in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Shortly after the the campaign in the central highlands, the Marines in the northern part of South Vietnam organized a search and destroy operation near Tam Ky code-named Harvest Moon. It lacked the major engagements of the Plieku Campaign, but I again found a pair of Steel Panthers/Squad Battles scenarios set within it. The scenarios are, to some extent, speculative and in any case lack the strategic importance of more recent tactical scenarios. Playing them, I consider what works and what doesn’t at this level and in these game engines.

This scenario has the US and ARVN defending a village centered around a large church.

First to the Steel Panthers scenario. The setup is similar to several other base defense scenarios that I’ve played recently. The Marines are in a defensive perimeter around their camp and the NVA infantry, played by the computer, comes at you in a sudden attack. The uniqueness of this one is that the Marines are defending a stone church, giving them a type of fortified position not often seen in Vietnam scenarios.

The scenario takes place in the unlikely village of Bi Phu. I say that because, first of all, I’m unable to find any reference to the village name or to any fighting that may have taken place here. Secondly, if Google translate can be relied upon (which is hardly a given, I know), the name means “tragic,” which would be a terrible thing to call your home village. The scenario notes source this battle from Don’t Bunch Up: One Marine’s Story by Captain William Van Zanten, a book I haven’t read, so I am hesitant to doubt anything about its authenticity. Reports for the unit described in the scenario notes don’t line up with the action reports referencing the unit at that time. Of course, even a minor typo in creating the scenario could just make it impossible to look up the information.

Like many of the base-defense scenarios, the player has little “strategy” to figure out. As the attackers come, you must halt them with small-arms fire as well as a couple of off-board assets. Eventually, you kill them and they stop coming. I think my only move in the whole game was when a section of the church caught on fire and I relocated the ARVN soldiers in that hex out of harms way. I appreciate having a unique village map created but otherwise I don’t see this one does much for me.

They enemy came out of the jungle and I chased them back in.

Squad Battles: Vietnam models an encounter occurring during the wrap-up phase of Operation Harvest Moon in the scenario The Battle at Ky Phu. A Marine battalion of three companies is returning to base along a road when they are assaulted by the Viet Cong. The placement of victory locations, three along the Marine’s road and three in the VC-controlled bush, incentivizes both sides to be on the attack.

I had just complained, somewhat, about the smallness of the LZ Albany scenario which, essentially has the same order of battle. No off-board artillery here, but the player does get one flamethrower. Accounts of the battle describe the Marines’ use of both Huey gunships and accurate artillery support. Nearly three-quarters of the VC losses were caused by artillery fire.

That said, the setup of this one does make a difference and it is enough to put it over the threshold to “interesting.” I would say the key to making this one worth playing is that, first, the player commands a full battalion. Second, the ground being fought over is varied and interesting. There are hills, fields, streams, and fairly substantial sight distances around the map. Third, the player’s goals are spread out across the map, but not so spread out that there aren’t some decisions to be made. How much do you hold back to defend the victory locations you hold at the beginning? Do you assign, basically, one company per enemy held objective and take them in parallel or do you try to use one company to support another? If you can’t plan to take all of the objectives, should you even waste lives trying?

On top of those details, the programmed opponent is able to do a little bit with this one. Like the player, the program sees it should both attack and defend. Variety is the spice of life.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. The next article covers Operation Masher, renamed to White Wing.

X Marks the Spot

Tags

Air Assault Task Force, Battle of Ia Drang, Cold War, Operation Silver Bayonet, Seven Firefights in Vietnam, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Steel Panthers, The Star and The Crescent, Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, WinSPMBT

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post. You could also start with my earlier post on the Silver Bayonet operation

Of all the tactical-scale scenarios on Vietnam, the LZ X-Ray battles were always my favorite. One obvious reason is that we have, courtesy of Mel Gibson, and nice vivid visual representation to connect to. Like Mel, the various scenario builders who have tackled this battle with one engine or another have Hal Moore’s book as a source. There is also the U.S. Army publication Seven Firefights in Vietnam, which was written during the war itself. Enthusiasts have the ability to create very detailed and accurate reconstructions of this battle without an inordinate amount of primary-source research.

For my first step, I returned again to Air Assault Task Force. I had a beast of a time getting it to work for the Battle of Mogadishu. Eventually I got it to do something and I hoped that my experience would improve when it came to other battles in this package.

The game, as distributed, includes a four-scenario version of the Battle at LZ X-Ray, each covering a multi-hour snippet over the several days of fighting. One somewhat-unique feature of this package is that it builds the scenarios over scanned maps of the battlefield so as to provide realistic and accurate terrain. In this case, the game map stretches from the 1st Cavalry staging point at Plei Me, through the fire base at LZ Falcon, onto the area of the battle. Part of the challenge is to manage and coordinate helicopter insertion and resupply across that long stretch of jungle.

First wave of landings inbound, I prep the LZ with artillery fire. In contrast to much of the UI, fire mission plotting works fairly well.

Immediately, I’m frustrated by the UI in this game. The game’s first scenario begins with the 1st Cavalry elements on the ground at Plei Me and the helicopter transport and gunships nearby, ready for action. This means that the first order of business is to get the infantry loaded onto the helicopters.

Good luck with that, eh?

As I described in that last article, the insertion mission just doesn’t seem to work for me at all. Manually loading the troops also wouldn’t work. Finally, in desperation, I switched between the multiple versions of this system that I own (namely the newer, but horrific UI, of Air Assault Task Force and its predecessor, The Star and the Crescent). What I found was that, using Air Assault Task Force, I could successfully order the infantry to load up onto the helicopters. I could then save and load back into The Star in the Crescent to manually order my troops to the landing zone.

Flush with success, I sent my helicopters back to pick up more troops and ordered my initial company into a defensive position. The scale of the game doesn’t encourage micromanagement of tactical position. In fact, my initial positioning attempts, for some reason had them wandering off to the north, into the jungle. Hoping to make use of the game engine as it was intended, I gave them the mission “Support by Fire,” to try to get them into the proper defensive position while they waited for reinforcements to arrive. Big mistake.

My AI subordinates are deranged. Or treasonous.

The system decided that the best way to accomplish such a support mission was to march, on foot, all the way back to Plei Me then turn around, march all the way back to the a position in the jungle near the landing zone and then… well, who knows what would happen then, the scenario would have timed out. I’ll point out that I am explicitly trying to defend the cleared area where I will be unloading my helicopters. Even reproducing this bizarre situation is difficult but what appears to have happened is that, because of the limited capacity of my helicopter transport, I’ve split the command that I gave the order to and so the engine’s first order of business is to reunite the command before moving into position.

Reload, try again. My second insertion is complete, but I don’t think they brought any soldiers with them this time. Too bad, the enemy is here.

After reloading and reissuing all the orders, my initial elements appear to be in a defensive position at the landing zone. While the graphics show them to be standing around in a cluster, their status is actually “defilade.” It also appears that all I’ve got there is a company commander and a weapons platoon. When I tried to bring in another group of troopers, everything seemed to go as before, but it looks like the helicopters arrived empty (screenshot immediately above).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It baffles me as to how this game has survived to this day is this state. My only guess is that with a saintly amount of perseverance, one can learn to overcome the UI and get the game to do something close to what was intended. Once one puts that amount of effort into it, perhaps there is pleasure to be derived from the game. It is hard to see wasting so much time, though, when moves have me wondering whether helicopters are going to unload units or they have once again shown up empty.

Lt. Col. Moore has set up a headquarters and directs his troopers into position.

Contrast this with a very similar scenario in Steel Panthers. In this scenario also, the clock begins with the 1st Cavalry troopers at Plei Me, ready to be transported, but this time with the first wave embarked. While the map isn’t actually to scale, there is a wide distance between the base and the landing zone, requiring 2 to 3 turns for transport. The victory hexes are awarded largely for gaining control of the landing zone, although there are several more to the west of the LZ. Presumably these additional points represent Lt. Col. Moore’s actual task, which was a search and destroy against suspected enemy positions just beyond his landing site. It wasn’t until after landing that he realized he was fighting a defensive battle against a vastly superior (numerically) force.

As I played this scenario all the way through my biggest regret, I think, came in that opening move. The initial set up not only has the first load of infantry mounted on helicopters but the artillery are loaded-up and waiting at Plei Me also. This is a bit of a departure from reality as one of the LZ Falcon artillery batteries had been in position already for days. The second was to be set-up that morning but planned to land well ahead of the infantry insertion. Not quite realizing what I was dealing with, my artillery was put into place simultaneously with the first infantry landing in LZ X-Ray. I’m quite sure that it didn’t make any difference in the outcome, but I feel cheated not being able to “prep” the landing site with an artillery barrage. That felt import to me.

I also felt the game took a cheap shot at me [SPOILER WARNING – FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH]. There are snipers positioned to hit the in-bound choppers. I didn’t loose anybody to them, but a couple of hits meant that my helicopter “retreated” from the map without having unloaded its troops. The position of the snipers is in a place, and I’ll give it away without being explicit, where the lazy player will get shot up. Problem is, I’m pretty lazy. So even having lost a couple of transports, I continued flying into the same (or at least similar) traps because I wanted to save myself some mouse clicks. Point is, I feel a little cheated in that I was being punished for trying to cut down on the clicking. More clicking is not better gameplay.

Overall, this was a positive scenario from the realism perspective. This wasn’t a precise simulation, but it does tackle the portion of this battle that fit within the limits of the Steel Panthers engine, namely that first hour-and-a-half. It may not, however, be the most interesting part of the battle. While landing, the American forces were slowly realizing the quantity of enemy they faced. This scenario has an unknown quantity and position of the enemy facing you and, certainly, if you push out too rapidly from the landing zone you’re going start suffering losses. The length of the scenario doesn’t give you time for the full encounter to develop and, admirably, the scenario developer didn’t try to squeeze the extras in.

For that we go to Squad Battles.

Squad Battles: Tour of Duty has a LZ X-Ray scenario (as well as an LZ Albany one, which I’ll get to later). It’s purpose is, apparently, to capture the moment of the battle where the first three cavalry companies have landed and fend of the initial NVA assaults. With this in mind, there are no helicopter insertions over the course of the scenario. Also, and disappointingly for me, there is no off-board fire-support either from LZ Falcon, from close air support, or from helicopter gunships. This means that the player has the support from the battalion’s mortar company in addition to direct fire. Furthermore, that direct fire is typically only against adjacent units. This is another scenario set in dense foliage where it is rare to be able to spot enemies across more than one hex.

The Lost Platoon is in serious trouble. Can I get them back in time? No.

All of this means we are looking at what I’ve described before as a typical Squad Battles scenario. The choices are few and you’re already in control of the objectives, so there is little in the way of maneuver that makes sense. The biggest choice is the “lost platoon” and the extent to which you try to rescue it. I probably took something close the the historical path in that I made an attempt to get to it and then stopped when I realized that I couldn’t do it. For what its worth (and, hopefully, not ruining the scenario for anyone), failing to rescue the lost platoon, losing it in its entirety plus incurring casualties among the rescuers; this still gave me a decisive victory. Point being, this isn’t a scenario where you have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something that was deemed impossible in the real fight. Simply not being overrun, apparently, counts as a win.

As far as the Tour of Duty scenarios go, this one is average. Average in both size and scope as well as in game play. While it is pretty hemmed in, it doesn’t have quite the frustration level of the “take these three victory locations in six moves” scenarios. Still, given my expectations for this battle, I’ve come away from this one extra disappointed.

There is another LZ X-Ray scenario, one built by an end-user, that I played many years ago. Sadly, it seems to have been lost in the shuffling of website ownership (it used to be stored at wargamer.com when Wargamer archived scenario files). I must have the file on an old hard disk somewhere around here but, up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth booting up old systems to try to find it. It’s a shame to see this stuff vanish from the internet so arbitrarily, especially as cloud storage becomes ever more available.

In this one, the focus is more on that “broken arrow” moment of the battle. The point when things were at their worst and the maximal air power and fire support that the Americans could muster was brought down around their defensive perimeter. Titled LZ X-Ray – First Contact, it struck me as a truly “fun” scenario in a ways that the above version was not. I’m not sure if it is really much of a challenge from the U.S. side, but you sure get to control a lot of firepower. As a challenging fight, it may be more interesting from the Commie side, trying to get your soldiers to survive the American rain of fire, but I never tried it that way.

If I ever find that file intact, I’ll let you know.

The situation on November 17th. This doesn’t look like what was in Moore’s book.

By way of contrast, I include for you another screenshot of my Ia Drang ’65 scenario, this time where the clock has advanced to the point where the U.S. has seized initiative and what would be the assault on LZ X-Ray. What we see, instead of a recreation of the historical battle, is a typical TOAW scenario. The forces spread out across the map trying to maintain cohesive lines while simultaneously cutting off and isolating the enemy. Engagements are somewhat limited by the scenario’s withdrawl schedule, but the engine would seem to encourage continuous attack right up until the time limit runs out, so as not to leave any victory points on the table. At least that’s the way I and my computer opponent are playing it.

What should have happened just before X-Ray, I found out by reading Seven Firefights in Vietnam, was that the NVA was regrouping for another shot at Plei Me, likely to take place within a few turns had the U.S. not took the fight to them. Communist forces were largely idle, preparing themselves for their own attack. Likewise, the 1st Calvary units were moving about the map trying to find an elusive enemy, not perpetually engaging them as they retreated or counter-attacked. This lead to a period of relative quiet between the breaking up of the attack on Plei Me and the three days of fighting over the landing zone.

Seven Firefights in Vietnam is, as I said, another reason why this battle gets the simulation love that it has. Reading it, as I did, well after reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it can feel somewhat anticlimactic, but certainly not a complete waste of time. Seven Firefights is but a chapter in a book that’s only 150+ pages total, so you know its going to not have the depth of the later work. It also focus on tactics. It was meant to be a learning tool for the professional soldier about a war that was still ongoing. Moore’s book, by contrast, is in part a tribute to the fallen soldiers of the battle and the war and tends to have a lot more focus on the personal rather than just tactics and command.

OK. So this is … unique.

Seven Firefights is a nice, easily digestible account of the battle that is made all the better by the fact that is available for free as a electronic book. While mostly encompassed by newer accounts, it still gave me some unique insights into the fight.

Speaking of available for free, the website for the book has battle animations that illustrate the fight in a way superior to most other attempts that I’ve seen. Again, very valuable for helping to all that happened over those three days into a proper perspective.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, where I discuss two more U.S. Army publications.

Hit the Beach

Tags

Cold War, Operation Starlite, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post. My series of posts about Operation Starlite starts off with a board game discussion, here.

Although I had made a note to myself to look up the Squad Battles: Vietnam scenario that took place during Operation Starlite, when it came time to do it, I forgot.

The scenario called The Battle at LZ Blue takes place during Operation Starlite and covers some of the worst fighting of the entire operation, near the Viet Cong entrenched positions on Hill 23. The Marine infantry company tasked to land at the southern-most landing zones (designated Red, White, and Blue) found that their landing zone was coming under fire, with enemies both to their front and their rear.

A hot LZ, but the real one this time. The map leaves selection of LZ-Blue up to the player.

In contrast to the Steel Panthers map, this one seems to get the scales (time and distance) accurate, as well as the size of the units engaged. The scenario runs for about an hour and a half, starting with landings at LZ Blue. At the same time, not far to the east, a Marine infantry company, having landed at Green Beach, is accompanied by a mix of armored fighting vehicles. Objectives have been marked within their combined area of operation and the player is free to mix and match these forces so as to best take all the objectives within the allotted time.

Although this setup is much closer to begin historically accurate, the fighting is, nevertheless, compressed to fit into the available number of turns. The setup also encourages more coordination than, I think, could possibly have taken place during the actual battle.

As I try to compare the scope of the computer battle with the historical ebb and flow, I find that The Battle at LZ Blue has renamed all of the units. I think a big part of this is that Squad Battles has a policy of not using real names in their stock scenarios. It was felt that the possibility of Vietnam War veterans who might either a) come across their own names in a scenario or, perhaps worse, b) come across the name of a fallen friend in a scenario would be disrespectful and best avoided.

Armor from the amphibious landing is on its way to help the helicopter troops out of a tight spot.

But Squad Battles goes a step farther. Despite the rather obvious connection between small unit actions and the forces they involved, the stock scenarios (mostly, always? I haven’t done a comprehensive check) rename the units themselves. In this case, the company tasked with securing Landing Zone Blue and then taking Nam Yen was Company H of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 3rd Marine Division. To their immediate east was the sector of Company I of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, who had made an amphibious landing. Despite the consecutive letters designating these two units, they hold very different places in the chain of command. It is true that as the first day of battle progressed, Company I mixed with armor from the landing and one platoon from Company H, owing to the difficulties they faced in their sector. This wasn’t, however, because they shared a common battalion commander.

So contrast the real situation for how it is set up in The Battle at LZ Blue. The order of battle employs two infantry companies, E and F, both of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment. Historically, the 14th was not even in Vietnam. Furthermore, placing all of the scenario’s infantry within the same battalion provides a coordination of commands (there is a Lieutenant Colonel represented in the game which is superior to all infantry units) that shouldn’t exist. One explanation may be the that “attaching” platoons outside their chains of command is not possible within the Squad Battles ruleset and this structure allows that fictional Lt. Col. to bridge the gap.

As Squad Battles scenarios go, this one is very big and very expansive. However, by allowing the mixing of several different units over fairly focused objectives in a short period of time, the resultant battle will necessarily be far less chaotic than the reality. The real Company H, upon landing, realized that it had unexpected enemy on its rear and launched its initial attack in the opposite direction from plan. By the time they began working towards their initial objective, they had already sustained casualties. Delays meant units weren’t where they were supposed to be and enemy units still occupied zones that should have been cleared.

Now, the fact that I can analyze what’s wrong with this scenario in such detail is itself a testimonial to how much more fidelity this has than the Steel Panthers version. When playing Steel Panthers, I lamented that there could have been battles, subsets of the operation, modeled correctly to scale. Instead, the game tried to shrink the entire battle into the engine’s parameters. Here we see an example of just what I was talking about. One of the more dramatic sections of the battlefield is isolated and modeled close to the correct scale. As before, we are mixing up something like six hours worth of fighting into a little more than an hour of game action, but that is probably necessary to provide a complete “story” with the scenario.

The result defies some Squad Battles‘ weaknesses. Being so much bigger than the typical fight, the player isn’t hemmed in to a single course of action. Particularly with helicopters and AmTracs at your disposal, you could probably hit all the objectives in almost any order you want. The lack of opponent AI is mitigated by the fact that they are placed in defensive positions to guard nearby victory locations. Little is required of them except that they shoot at you when you approach.

That said, in stark contrast to the battle portrayed, the scenario seems fairly easy to win. The real Company H fought well throughout the day but, in the end, returned to Landing Zone Blue without taking their objectives. This was no failure; their objectives were likely untenable given the unexpected location of enemy, particularly those on the wrong side of their landing location. Given this, how meaningful is The Battle at LZ Blue as a lesson about the actual battle? Or is this perhaps just a somewhat-more-accurate version of the Steel Panthers versions, giving the player a chance to mess around with a combination of helicopters and amphibious vehicles in a situation that resembles the reality?

I wrapped up my discussion of the Steel Panthers scenario with a thoughts on the artillery woes during the first day of Operation Starlite. I’ll do the same here. Notably lacking in Squad Battles: Vietnam is the massive artillery support which was available to Americans (in this and many of the other Squad Battles scenarios). The end of the fighting for Company H, indeed, involved the calling in of artillery and airstrikes onto the VC positions as the Americans withdrew. Yet in this scenario, there is no off-board artillery (or on-board, for that matter) and no air support. Again, it probably doesn’t pay to speculate too far on why the designer did not include it. The peculiarities of the artillery support that day may not have fit the model of artillery in Squad Battles. It may be that, having already made the scenario “winnable” by isolating the battlefield, throwing in huge amounts of artillery support would have been pointless. Whatever the case, I do feel that I’m missing out on one of the defining features of this fight.

All that said, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Squad Battles: Vietnam comes the closest to hitting Operation Starlite’s mark.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, for a tactical look at LZ X-Ray.

Lying Out There Like a Killer in the Sun

Tags

Bau Bang, Bruce Springsteen, Steel Panthers, Thunder Road, WinSPMBT

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Steel Panthers presents us with another “base defense” style scenario. In this one, it isn’t the base of the previous example, but rather an temporary defensive position that is part of a larger road clearing operation. The local Viet Cong commander attempted to grab a propaganda victory. By concentrating his forces on one element of the the U.S. operation he thought he could defeat U.S. armor with his Viet Cong guerrillas.

Like that previous scenario, this one seems to be correctly scaled in terms of an accurate representation of the battle. Turnwise, this scenario lasts for 45 minutes out of what was several hours of battle. It also seems to represent only the initial portion of the Viet Cong assault and seems to restrict the actions modeled to that portion of time. Again, it seems a bit counter-intuitive to give the player the static-defense side of the scenario. Unlike the earlier one, though, there are only a couple of turns where the automatic defensive-fire becomes annoyingly extensive. One it settles down, the turns become very playable.

Here they come.

Although this is a “user-made” scenario, the author of this one is long-time wargaming Veteran “Wild Bill” Wilder. The purpose of this creation is to demonstrate the effective use of armor in a war where deployment of armor units ran counter to doctrine. Seeing a name like this attached to a scenario makes me think of it more in terms of a “stock” scenario than a fan production.

The actual fight was another early engagement of the recently arriving units from America. The Third Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) was in the area and high command wanted to see them tested in live operations. In the area north of Saigon, the ARVN units were hampered in their operations by Viet Cong ambushes, which would plague them as they attempted to move along the roads. This, in turn, prevented ARVN units (in this case, the 5th ARVN Division) from engaging and displacing the enemy. U.S. assistance was required to clear and secure Highway 13 for a pending 5th Division operation. Someone began referring to Highway 13 as “Thunder Road,” a name which would seem ever more appropriate as the war unfolded.

The site covered by the scenario was located central to the operation and thus provided a good location for artillery support (not represented in the scenario) and command elements for the operation. Units had been positioned there already for a day when they drew an Viet Cong dawn ambush on the morning of the 12th.

The scenario’s written introduction in Steel Panthers emphasizes the employment of maneuver and its role in the success of the American defense. Indeed, the time-period within this scenario concentrates on the initial dawn assault, which was repulsed by a series of armored-vehicle counter-charges.

Unfortunately, that’s not how I played it.

Never quite sure how Steel Panthers applies its defensive bonuses, I always figure that a moving unit is more vulnerable than a stationary unit and that this applies double when it comes to initial scenario positions. Furthermore, not knowing where the attack was coming from or how extensive it might be, it seemed most effective to use my units to neutralize the enemy attacks with fire to the greatest extent possible rather than move. While I lost some M113s in the chaos of the initial mortar barrage (historically, the enemy mortars were not effective) my gut feeling was backed by the fact that I tended to lose vehicles to enemy anti-tank teams only when I moved them. My early movements involved only pulling back to more defensible positions and only moved forward again to secure victory locations once the enemy attack was broken up.

I’m not sure if the U.S. command learned the lesson expounded in the scenario description, that armored units could be effective in Vietnam. However, I am pretty sure I did not learn the intended lesson. Tanks can really good against infantry, especially if they can fight from well-supported positions on the defense and not be unduly exposed to anti-tank teams. Blind charges with armored vehicles against unseen and unknown enemies is generally not effective in Steel Panthers.

But about those tanks.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the scenario developer made a mistake when creating the order of battle for this one. At the Second Battle of Bàu Bàng, which would take place in March of 1967, Troop A (of a different Cavalry unit) had six M48 Patton tanks. From all the reading that I’ve done (though I’ve still got a source or two waiting to be read), Troop A of the 1st Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment operated, on November 12th of 1965, only M113s, no tanks. The Viet Cong’s intelligence identified the armored personnel carriers (and some mortar carriers) as “tanks” (a mistake that continues to the here and now), but I don’t think any were actually there.

In my game, I found the M113s extremely vulnerable to hidden anti-tank positions and did, in fact, rely on the Pattons to dominate the battlefield. In real life, the initial M113 charge was a tremendous success, running off the Viet Cong attackers without the loss of a single vehicle.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, which returns you to Operation Starlite for another tactical-level game.

When Will this War be Over and the Madness Leave the Air

Tags

Cold War, Flogging Molly, Men of Valor, Operation Starlite, Steel Panthers, The First Fight, The First Fight: US Marines in Operation Starlite, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

I had originally intended to comment, to whatever extent necessary, within the context of one big Operation Starlite post. The more I thought about my experiences with Steel Panthers and Men of Valor, the more I wanted to address these games individually. (See also the Master Post for Vietnam).

Operation Starlite was the first major engagement of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Yet, as a subject of popular culture, it receives short shrift relative to Ia Drang, Tet, and even the non-specific chaos of the period of maximum U.S. commitment. Perhaps the quick and one-sided U.S. victory lacks the requisite drama. Still, this operation was no walk in the park. U.S. casualties were within an order of magnitude of those at, for example, Landing Zone X-Ray.

While I’ve looked at it before as the operational level – a turn or two within a full-Vietnam game, I though I’d take a look at some details. Starlite is included in both the Steel Pathers and Men of Valor selections as a scenario and an operation respectively.

First to Steel Panthers.

A Hot LZ, and a fictional one to boot.

A quick summary of the fight on the Van Tuong Peninsula might be that the U.S. Marines used a combination of amphibious landings, helicopter insertions, and good, old-fashioned infantry marches to surround the VC position on all sides and then squeezed in upon them until the enemy was defeated. The Steel Panthers Starlite scenario incorporates all of that, but on a map that is roughly an order-of-magnitude too small. In shrinking the the battlefield, we can (and do) also compress the timescale. The bulk of the nearly-week-long operation is expected to be completed in about two hours by the game’s clock.

The battleground in perspective. The actual battle was scaled down by an order of magnitude to fit the game engine.

Steel Panthers remains a fun game engine to play with and what is nice about this scenario is you get to fiddle with the range of assets used for the operation. Amphibious units, tanks, close air support, and off-board artillery all play a role in helping your backbone of infantry capture a series of villages. However, I feel like a major opportunity to do better was squandered here.

It seems like there should have been ample opportunity to find battles within the operation that fit the scale of Steel Panthers. Should someone have taken the time to model that, playing the games would have been instructive as a unique view on the challenges of various, specific pieces of the battle. The problem, of course, is that a realistically-sized battle won’t have all the nifty pieces. The helicopter insertions weren’t “assaults,” in that that the landing zones were heavily defended. At its worst, debarking troops were subject to longish-range fire while they began moving forward. Certainly, this wasn’t a case of having to take and hold landing zones as would happen later in the Ia Drang valley. While fighting did occur on near the amphibious landing locations, in that battlefield sector, night came before significant number of the enemy were engaged.

The point of the “insertion” part of the operation was to get the units are in the right place to make infantry and combined-arms attacks against the VC positions. The primary reason the Steel Panthers treatment fails to reproduce the historical situation is, again, due to the compressed scales. The order of battle seems to be fairly accurate as is the placement of defenses. Just for one example, Landing Zone White was under fire from machine gun and small arms fire from a position over a kilometer away. While this caused some casualties, the Marines still spent nearly the next two hours completing their landings and organizing for an assault. In Steel Panthers, the main objectives are barely over a kilometer away from the landing sites and two hours would be the end of the game.

First (Person) to Fight

From Men of War, I don’t expect any kind of realism or much of a reproduction of history. But if Steel Panthers was bad, the opening sequence in the Starlite operation may be worse. We kick off our scenario conducting a helicopter assault on a defended beach.

RPG got one of my helicopters.

At least, that’s what they tell me in the mission briefing. While the terrain looks fairly beachy, I can’t spot any actual ocean, so I’ll have to take their word for it. Immediately upon exiting the helicopter, my squadmates start getting hit and I see that the beach defenders are using rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) to clear the skies of the inbound Marines. This sets up the first part of the mission. The player is to wipe out all RPGs so as to allow the follow-up helicopters to land intact.

The connection to the actual operation is made with a narrated video sequence which precedes the actual gameplay. This does provide an accurate summary of Starlite as well as some (presumably) footage from the battle. Back in the game itself, we rapidly depart from reality. The missions are tenuously related to the operation, but only tenuously. After scrambling off the beach, the player is required to capture several hill-top bunkers, which sounds like something Starlite-related, but the time and geography is all too compressed to imagine this fitting into the historical fight.

It is a far cry from Medal of Honor (and I’m thinking of the D-Day sequences) where the missions were so evocative of the their historical counterparts it became possible to forget that you were running through a linear mission. Then again, it is a linear mission that consists of gather “power-ups” from the ground as you run through the jungle, so any failure of expectations is probably more my problem than the game’s.

It also tosses in the “good lieutenant, bad lieutenant” story that it cribbed from the movies, augmenting the racial angle introduced in earlier parts. It’s an attempt to add a high-production value type of “drama” using a medium that no longer supports it. It’s easy enough to ignore. If only there were a way to skip over the cut scenes after you’ve seen them, it would be even easier. On the plus side, the game introduces the bunkers and tunnel systems that we realized were part of the Viet Cong’s operation, probably for the first time in the war.

True Accounting

I’ve dwelt on this before but I’ll use it again here – the mid-sixties represent an inflection point of sorts in transitioning from the post-World War II weapons system development to the institution of the modern weapon systems. I can also see an introduction of modern management thinking into the operation of the army. Going back to the Second World War and earlier, details of battles can sometimes be hard to come by. In reconstructing a battle for gaming purposes, one generally has to rely on the research of professional historians and published history books to get the details. For the battles of Vietnam, we have much better access to detailed after-action reports. Is this qualitatively different that Korea? Or earlier? I don’t have the expertise to judge, and some of it may be the way records were preserved as opposed to the way they were created. In any event, the War in Vietnam has been well-documented.

Furthermore, the military has made an effort to turn the data the it has on Vietnam into history-book style narratives for the purposes of training and memorialization. Perhaps, here, we are also seeing an effort to preserve the perspective of aging veterans before their knowledge passes on from our society along with the individuals who remember. The military may also be reacting against the contemporary narrative of the Vietnam War which, as often as not, was written from an anti-Government, anti-Military perspective.

Whatever the case, I was able to accompany my gameplay with a reading of the U.S. Marine Corps’ pamphlet The First Fight: US Marines in Operation Starlite, August 1965. It’s a solidly written summary of the battle, absent any obvious moralizing or slant. In addition to helping me make sense of the distortions in the several game treatments of this battle, I learned a thing to two more.

According to this book, the concept that has the basis for explaining this entire battle is apparently not true. I’ve seen in source after source that the U.S. stole a march on the VC, pulling off a rapid attack on them just as they were preparing to hit the U.S. base. In here we read that the VC were nowhere near ready to assault Chu Lai. In fact, it is questionable whether they were intending to do so at all. The concentration of the 1st Viet Cong Regiment was for the purpose of resting, recovering from earlier losses, and recruiting new troops. We now know that the unit had no specific or immediate plans to attack the American base.

There is no indication that the intelligence was deliberately twisted nor willfully, selectively misinterpreted to create the “need” to launch an offensive by U.S. Marines directly against the VC. Intelligence was simply incomplete and, in this one key aspect, inaccurate.

Another enlightening tidbit, given the mission structure in Men of Valor, was within the section analyzing how well the different pieces worked or didn’t. One area of weakness was in the directing of indirect fire support, especially naval guns. The fire support, when it arrived, was generally accurate and effective. The biggest problem, the book explains, was in the communication which resulted in delays between when fire was ordered and when it landed. Artillery support that is delayed 15 minutes against a moving enemy is not going to be effective.

There were a number of instances where friendly fire casualties were narrowly avoided. Many of these close calls were likely due to the multitude of simultaneous moving parts present on the battlefield. Throughout it all, again, we are seeing a consequence of the communication difficulties and the delays. It can be easy for an area recently occupied by enemy forces to, 15 minutes later, have friendly forces in it. There was also a theory, which has not been positively confirmed, that the VC had access to American communication networks and were directing naval fire and airstrikes onto American positions. It is also possible that communication errors were responsible, but the book makes a strong cases that there were a few too many coincidences to not point the finger at VC penetration of U.S. communication systems.

It is said that one learns more from one’s failures than from success. The difficulties the U.S. faced in an overall-successful operation made for some solid learning opportunities that improved the effectiveness of American warfighting power going forward. It is fortunately that lessons regarding close artillery support were learned without tragic friendly-fire casualties. This aspect of the battle adds a little more meaning to the plot point in Men of Valor where the player’s unit is unable to move artillery bombardments off of friendly positions. It did actually happen (although probably nothing like in the game) and was, truly, a defining feature of the Operation Starlite fight.

I take a look at another Operation Starlite scenario in this post, if you want to skip ahead to that. You may also want to return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, which moves the action to the Central Highlands.

Giggity

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Family Guy, master post, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Steel Panthers, timeline, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

A master post for the Vietnam War. The U.S. version. The Quagmire.

After seeing a brief mention of Fire In The Lake in the Wall St. Journal, I picked back up reading We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. From there, I got into looking at all the games/scenarios that take place during America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

The big question, when it comes to Vietnam games, is how do you get this right? What scale or scales were capture the era? How to effectively model asymmetric warfare – either in Vietnam or in general? How do you balance the military portions of the game with the political?

Once upon a time, there was very little to chose from when it came to the Vietnam War. It is still not the most popular timeframe to place a game but, at this point, I would say it has solid coverage. There have been a number of treatments of the war as a whole, including of course the newish Fire In The Lake. Operational level scenarios take on different lengths and sizes as do the tactical games. This goes all the way down to the first-person shooter, with Rising Storm 2: Vietnam being (as of this writing and as far as I know) the most recent addition to the computer games with a Vietnam theme.

As I explore these questions, these games, and read up on the period, I expect I will be writing a lot of posts. This master post will serve as a collection point for them.

Vietnam posts (in order of their appearance) are as follows:

1. Way back when, I wrote a pair of posts on the French phase of the Vietnam War.
2. That Wall St. Journal article.
3. Now in the mood, I again watched Full Metal Jacket to appreciate the recently-passed R. Lee Ermey.
4. In celebration of Memorial Day, I watched We Were Soldiers.
5. Skipping ahead, all the way to the end of the war, I watched a PBS documentary on the United States’ final days in Saigon.
6. I played and critiqued an HPS Squad Battles representation of a pre-Tonkin fight between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese.
7. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and a CMANO scenario depicting it.
8. I also read the book, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young.
9. A Steel Panthers scenario depicting an early South Vietnam defense against a Viet Cong assault led to a discussion of game design.
10. I read the book Incident at Muc Wa.
11. This post, right here.
12. Another discussion of Fire in the Lake and, in particular, its tutorial scenario. The focus is on the connection between card-driven game events and calendar dates.
13. The 1984 Victory Games title Vietnam 1965-1975 is, arguably, the grandfather of all current strategic treatments of the Vietnam War in gaming.
14. Switching the focus back to computer games, I play one of The Operational Art of War‘s large implementations of the Vietnam War, the scenario Vietnam 1965-1968.
15. Some discussion of the development path that may have lead from Vietnam 1965-1975 to Fire in the Lake. Specifically, I talk about the elimination of the tactics of operations at one end of the scale and the grand strategic and political decisions at the other.
16. More Operational Art of War, looking at pair of scenarios, one scaling up and one scaling down from my previous go at it.
17. Switching gears to look at a First Person Shooter treatment of the War in Vietnam.
18. For another first-person treatment of sorts, the flight simulator IL-2 takes on Vietnam as well. Some early-war missions involved close air support using A-1 Skyraiders.
19. Continuing with the air war, a CMANO scenario takes on Operation Spring High, a retaliatory strike against a pair of SAM sites that had successfully downed an American F-4.
20. Like post #13, this one focuses on Operation Starlite within the bigger picture as we move on Volume 2 of the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations set of scenarios in The Operational Art of War.
21. Digging down to a lower level, we look at Starlite in finer detail (but with less historical precision) through scenarios in Steel Panthers and Men of Valor. So as not to lose touch, I’ve accompanied this all with a read through of a Marine Corps historical pamphlet.
22. At last, I come around again to the fighting in the Ia Drang Valley that I was looking at up in post #4. In this case, I’m looking at Operation Silver Bayonet from the operational level in The Operational Art of War and Vietnam ’65.
23. While the fighting in Ia Drang Valley would come to dominate Hollywood’s view of November, 1965, there were significant operations ongoing further south. Operation Hump also resulted in heavy fighting with dozens of U.S. casualties.
24. Also near Saigon, Operation Road Runner put a U.S. mixed-force battalion in the path of a Viet Cong ambush near the hamlet of Bau Bang.
25. While on a roll with Squad Battles: Vietnam, I go back to the Operation Starlite scenario included with that package.
26. Once again returning to the We Were Soldiers subject matter, I look at a handful of tactical scenarios taking on the subject.
27. The next post gives a brief nod to a pair of booklets published by the U.S. Army summarizing the Vietnam War’s big picture.
28. I then double back to Operation Starlite and, much like the commander at the time, make a second attempt at taking Hill 43, this time with a historically-accurate order of battle.
29. One more look at the The Operational Art of War and a scenario that attempts to capture the entire conflict at a strategic level.
30. Wrapping up my articles which cover the fighting in We Were Soldiers, I look at both Steel Panthers and Squad Battles:Tour of Duty for their scenarios covering LZ Albany.
31. The U.S. Army also has published series of full-length books on their experience in Vietnam. I look at the one covering 1965-1966.
32. On to Operation Harvest Moon and a pair of tactical scenarios, one from Steel Panthers and one from Squad Battles: Vietnam.
33. Operation Masher (renamed White Wing) was another 1st Cavalry Operation modeled in the original Operational Art of War scenario package. I discuss that and two other portrayals of this fight.
34. A Wall St. Journal editorial talks about how the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War may have saved Southeast Asia.
35. While Operation Masher/White Wing had some attempts to effectively simulate the battle, I had no equivalent scenarios for the fighting in the South. Instead, I look at some purely hypothetical scenarios in two of the games that we know well.
36. Immediately following the end of Operation Double Eagle (the Marine Corps operation that accompanied White Wing, Marines launched Operation Utah in an attempt to destroy the 21st PAVN Regiment near the village of Chau Nhai.

In addition to the post, I also created a new timeline. My goal with this was two-fold. First, the way I’ve organized my two Cold War timelines, I’ve split the war into two parts. That split doesn’t divide the war evenly or even logically*. A single timeline helps one to see the continuity of the 10+ year period from 1963 or so through 1975.

Second, I needed help organizing all of the scenarios. More than any era that I’ve looked at so far, the Vietnam War has dozens of scenarios from a whole bunch of different games, all scattered across the war’s timeline. It became impossible for me to remember what game to look at to find the next applicable scenario in chronological order. Sorting them all out on the timeline means I can discover various games haphazardly, stick them in their place, and then come back later and see them in the bigger picture.

*As I’ve explained elsewhere, the break in the Cold War timeline was done where it is for two reasons. First, there is a shift in weapons systems between the the more experimental pre-1966 and the structured post-1966 when it comes to American designs. Secondly, at the time I conceived of creating a second timeline, I decided start anew 50 years from the date that I did it.

But We’ll Die for Good Pay

Tags

Cold War, Congo, Steel Panthers, Steve Earle, WinSPMBT

When I watched the movie about the Siege at Jadotville, I lamented the fact that were no games to accompany my viewing. Move history forward a few years, though, and coverage for the events in what had become the formerly-Belgian Congo was solved by scenario creator Tom DeShetler and his work with Steel Panthers. It is Scenario 172, “DRAGON ROUGE (Red Dragon).”

One of the ways to get around the fiddliness of off-board artillery is to have it all pre-configured. The scenario opens with a bombing attack of the town.

Throughout 1964, a communist rebellion raged against the government of Joseph Kasa-Vubu. The Simba rebels had coalesced around exiled political supporters of the murdered Patrice Lumumba and were backed by the communist governments of Russia, Cuba, and China. They quickly took control of roughly half of the Republic of Congo. With the national army of Congo letting the rebels capture territory largely without a fight, the government turned to mercenaries to combat the insurgents.

As the rebels captured territories, they took as hostages white Europeans. By late fall, the number was in the thousands with at least a thousand being held in Stanleyville. The government worked with the West to come up with a solution, one that ultimately consisted of a joint operation between Belgian troops, mercenary forces, and U.S. air support.

This is the first air drop scenario that I’ve played in Steel Panthers.

This scenario makes for a unique experience. Not only does it provide a look at a conflict that otherwise probably won’t see much game-wise (I don’t expect John Tiller to put out a $40 scenario package on the Congo Crisis), but it also has some unique features. It has a combined operation of mercenaries and the Belgians and a combination of para-dropped forces and some heavier vehicles. The objectives are interesting, both seizing territory and rescuing civilians (who are also represented on the map and controlled by the player). A few surprises also wait for the player as the scenario plays out.

Punctuated by Moments of Terror

Tags

ARMA, Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, FPS, Pham Van Dinh, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, wargames, WinSPMBT

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

One of the scenarios in Steel Panthers is a fairly obscure battle which took place in December of 1964. It is a portrayal of a Viet Cong (VC) attack on an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) base during the period where the communists were moving towards a strategy of more direct military engagement on the battlefield. It is suggested that, against the AI, the player take the side of the ARVN.

My ARVN troops are well entrenched as the take on the communist human wave assaults.

The source material is a little thin on this assault, which took place near Tam Ky. That said, the size and scale of the Steel Panthers implementation seems about right to fully and accurately portray the battle. The game lasts for an hour and a half of real time, a reasonable duration to depict a sudden and overwhelming attack. The ARVN, at least (I don’t think the VC order of battle is in any way documented), is represented fully in a one-to-one ratio.

Being on the defensive, the player’s decisions are greatly simplified. Mostly, whenever it is your turn, you just have to designate targets for each of the units on your side. Occasionally it is necessary to pull a unit back out of an untenable defensive position, but for the most part remaining dug in is preferable to maneuvering around. As I’ve said before when it comes to Steel Panthers, managing the individual weapons and vehicles can be fun, but it gets tedious to visit every unit on every turn for, in this case, up to 31 turns in a row. To add to the tedium, the computer turns are incredibly long.  As each VC attacker advances, they come under fire from multiple defenders. For all of the clicking and shooting, though, not much is really happening. Most of the time the VC units are halted and pinned down by our defenders.

This got me to thinking how this should be done right, given the capabilities of modern games. I’d say the scenario demonstrates that this is a very good size and scope for portraying Vietnam engagements. However, if a game simply brought the Steel Panthers graphics and UI into the current era, it would still suffer the tedium of all that micromanagement. Putting this scenario into an RTS would certainly move things along, but then you lose most of the fun (actually getting involved with the individual weapons) and create a click-fest hell for the player. There is a reason almost every RTS has a unrealistically small unit count.

The key here may be to simulate command, communications, and control in a realistic manner for the time and technology.

One example that might work with a turn-based game, otherwise mostly similar to Steel Panthers, is what is used in Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. That system uses a special form of “WeGo.” That is, orders are entered, and then the resolution of those order are resolved for both side simultaneously. The catch in Flashpoint Campaigns is that the two players don’t enter their commands simultaneously. There is variability on how long between “turns” each player has, as well as a limit (not known upfront) as to how many units can be commanded.

In Flashpoint Campaigns, it is ostensibly modelling curtailed communications due to the jamming of signals on the World War III battlefield. Of course, this isn’t an effect that has actually happened, so we aren’t trying to accurately simulate the resulting communication issues. Rather, it is a matter of what makes for kind of a nifty game mechanic meshing pretty well with something that may well have been a major factor on the battlefield, had such a battle actually occurred in that time and place.

But what if we looked at the actual communications issues during the Vietnam era. For this case, let’s rely on the the LZ-XRay battle, because we are familiar with the issues of command having read the book. In that fight, Hal Moore had limited ability to command his platoons. He knew where he had sent them, but the details of his intentions were left to his captains and lieutenants to carry out. In the case of the “Lost Platoon,” the execution of the command was quite a bit different then the formulation of it. Further, once the chaos of battle hit, communications were dependent on radios and their operators. The radios could fail, sustain damage, or just not work properly. Operators could be injured or killed and then replaced, or not.

I can only begin to imagine what the details might look like, but there seems that a good system, based on commanders and communications, could simulate the tenuous ability to control across an entire battle of the size in these Vietnam fights. The added bonus is that the micromanagement goes way down and the amount of thinking and planning goes way up. If you are unsure whether you’ll be be able to command your units in the next round, or even when that “next round” will come, you have be be judicious about what commands you give.

Another possibility is the First Person Shooter (FPS). At the time Steel Panthers was fresh, the height of FPS technology was Doom II. Fast-forward 10-20 years and the FPS genre now encompasses commanding squads in a way that rivals an RTS treament of small-unit actions.

While there is FPS coverage of Vietnam, it is a little sparse. A 2004 release, Men of Valor, attempts to port the Medal of Honor style of gameplay from WWII to Vietnam. This is a treatment where a the player follows a scripted story; it is not means of reproducing battles. Several of the open-ended FPS games do have Vietnam mods for them. Notable to me is the project in ARMA, a user-created mod called Vietnam: The Experience. Notable because I’ve played ARMA. Red Orchestra has also been modded and released as the product Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. I note this one because it is a current and popular game. Unlike ARMA (in any of its versions), Rising Storm 2 is meant only to be an on-line multiplayer game. There is no single player.

While the sandbox style of ARMA provides a fair basis for a Vietnam mod, the issue of command and communication probably cannot be properly addressed without changes in the way ARMA does things. In ARMA 2 and 3, we are dealing with approximations of current or near-future wars. It makes sense that the ability to track and chat with your fellow players is an approximation of the technology available on the modern battlefield. In a Vietnam setting, would the same level of omniscience detract from the simulation aspects? Would it ruin a game if we had a heads-up display of how many of the “lost platoon” were still alive at any given point? Or is it still a decent approximation of how, via radio communication, information on battlefield communications was already coming into the modern age?

I’ll make an analogy with CMANO and its use for air and sea battles shortly after the end of the Second World War. The interface can still work provided that it is used only to show the lesser amount of information available to, for example, the Korean War commander. In this way, the game’s UI still approximates the level of information and control that that a real commander might have, using radio and a team of controllers. However, unlike the in a modern battle, where the CMANO interface closely approximates the computer display which a commander might be watching, the graphical UI in the context of the Korean War is simply that – a convenient interface. It detracts, rather than adds, to immersion.

So is it possible to create an immersive “commander” interface using a first-person display? What if you modeled the existing communications and the limitations that the radio places upon them. What if you were able to approximate the information flowing to and from you, as the commander. One might imagine an experience similar to the Scourge of War series. In the Civil War, you are commanding a Division or even a Corps, and the interface is more RTS than FPS. But in a small unit action, the first person interface might make sense. A Captain or a Major might even, if necessary, pick up an M-16 and fire some shots. Given a choice between the command interfaces of Scourge of War versions ARMA, I think I’d prefer the latter. This assumes, of course, that an era-appropriate method of simulating the difficulties of command and communication can be inserted. Dispatches are no longer sent around by riders on horseback, but there was still a reliance on “running” orders that should not be ignored.

The other part of the battlefield that I just don’t think ARMA simulates correctly is close artillery support. In We Were Soldiers Once…, Moore attributes his victory to his ability to direct artillery fire and air support. Doing this right would be a major step in moving away from a “Shooter” and towards a simulator of small unit actions. Doing it right might even trump what is the norm for tactical-level strategy games currently. Steel Panthers (and Squad Battles, too, for that matter) uses the system that exists in most World War II board games. There are spotter units on the board who, with line of sight to a target hex, can order in indirect fire. That fire comes with uncertainties in both timing and accuracy. Against a moving enemy, indirect fire is often ineffective. Contrast that to the descriptions in We Were Soldiers Once… of the use of Forward Air Controllers to bring support fire accurately and efficiently onto enemies with which the ground forces are directly engaged.

So while nothing out there is right on the money, it wouldn’t take that much to make an ARMA (or Rising Storm 2 perhaps*) into something that would allow the player to command small unit actions. Would that be a better interface than a traditional RTS (with which ARMA has some overlap, I might add)? Would it beat the traditional hex-and-counter implementation?

There must be a way to do this that is more fun than slogging it through, bullet by bullet, in a Steel Panthers scenario.

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*The focus on ARMA, in part, are examples of custom scenario designs made for that engine. The continued relevance of Steel Panthers stems from the ability of users to create scenarios for an unlimited variety of situations. The key to a better future would be retaining that important aspect of the past.