Conjunction Junction, How’s That Function?

Tags

Bau Bang, Cold War, Radio Commander, schoolhouse rock, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the fifty-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.

In February of 1967, preparations began for what was to be one of the the largest operations of the Vietnam War, code-named Operation Junction City. The offensive targeted the communist stronghold referred to as “War Zone C” with a massive invasion intended to trap and destroy what was referred to as the “mini-Pentagon,” an informal term for the Central Executive Committee of the People’s Revolutionary Party. This was the administrative headquarters directing the anti-government forces in the South.

The operation has an unprecedented scale for this scenario series. In the weeks before Junction City is to take place, preparations such as this diversion, are among the player’s tasks.

In gaming terms, I had some high hopes for this operation. It is covered by scenarios in three (or four, depending on your counting method) games; Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume V in The Operational Art of War, a scenario in each version of Squad Battles, and a campaign scenario in Radio Commander. In some ways, it provides an unprecedented opportunity to compare different games and different scales while looking at a single battle. The key is the scale of the operation. Junction City itself lasted for 82 days and that can be pushed to over 100 if you include preparatory operations such as Operation Gadsden. The U.S. forces committed included much of the 1st Infantry and 25th Infantry Divisions, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. This is potentially 30 turns in Vietnam Combat Operations with a maneuver area this actually meshes well with the TOAW mechanics.

Horseshoe? It is hard to separate hammer from anvil in this screenshot. In what is considered by some to be bad luck, the “horseshoe” faces downward.

As I’ve explained, the scenario manual instructs you which units were historically involved in the operation in question and directs you how to place them historically. Satisfactorily doing so will earn you victory points as well as help match your play with the built-in triggers. You are, of course, free to deviate from the historical path in whatever ways you see fit.

Operation Junction City consisted of a horseshoe-shaped static perimeter intended to isolate the area containing the mini-Pentagon and to prevent enemy from escaping the operational area. With the perimeter established, a massive mechanized force entered the open end of the horseshoe from the south, sweeping north. They would either engage the enemy forces and annihilate them or force them against the waiting forces of the prepared perimeter.

In the end, my massive operation netted little more than a captured supply base.

The problem was, the communists, perhaps alerted to their vulnerability by sources inside the South Vietnam government, were able to move their logistics center to Cambodia and avoid being trapped by the operation. What engagements there were resulted in lopsided American victories, but the large scale battle where the U.S. expected to have a clear advantage did not materialize. While casualty ratios (per U.S. estimates) were on the order of 9:1, that did mean a non-trivial loss approaching 300 American servicemen in addition to equipment losses. In this, the scenario accurately recreates the operation. Besides a few inconclusive (and obscured by the game’s fog of war) battles, my only result was the location and destruction of an enemy supply center.

A very nice array of assets. both armor an artillery.

Absent a major, defining battle, one probably can’t expect the tactical-level games to integrate in any way with the operational treatment. For the Squad Battles scenarios, there is really nothing about them that gives a uniquely “Junction City” feel to them. In fact, the first of the two fits in just as well with one of my previous articles as as it contributes to this topic.

March 20th, around about midnight, saw a VC assault on a Fire Support Base 20 near the village of Bàu Bàng. Such an assault was anticipated by the American command, due to its proximity to a known communist stronghold, and so forces (3rd Squadron) from the Fifth Cavalry Regiment were deployed to defend the artillery. This fight is sometimes designated as the Second Battle of Bàu Bàng, the first having been fought in November of 1965. When I played a (First) Battle of Bàu Bàng in Steel Panthers, I suspected that a research error had caused some M48 Pattons to incorrectly make it into the order of battle. It is this, the 1967 scenario where the defenders have a mix of M113s and M48s and the Squad Battles setup accurately provides them.

Now, for all my complaints about deviation from historical lethality, my results in this scenario were very much matched to the historical results. I wound up losing only one AFV (it happened to be the one highlighted in the above screenshot) whereas the U.S. lost two vehicles to enemy fire in the portion of the actual fight modeled* by the scenario. Although the ability to rapidly react and to establish and expand a perimeter was a key element in the U.S. victory, I mostly fought from fixed positions. In any case, the scenario gives the (American) player a nice mix of armor and artillery. It’s a slaughter, but that’s the reality. The real-world casualty ratio was pushing 100:1.

Another fire base defense scenario.

Move ahead a day, and we get to the next of the Squad Battles scenarios. This one was part of the Squad Battles: Vietnam package, as opposed to Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, but like the first it is a fire base defense scenario. In this case, the defenses are manned by dug-in infantry of the 4th Infantry Division. What’s special about this scenario is that it (as seen in the above screenshot) models the direct fire capability of the artillery batteries using flechette ammunition, also called “beehive” rounds due to the buzzing noise they produce on their way to their target. Direct fire from defending artillery was often a factor when defending a fire base and this scenario allows the player to experience this capability hands-on.

Cavalry riding to the rescue.

As with the previous day’s action, armor was a factor. The player is granted four tanks to rush toward the sound of the guns. Moving them at maximum speed, they can engage the enemy for the last few turns of the scenario. In my case, they may have contributed to the salvaging of one of the victory locations, although it is hard to tell. I also lost a tank to RPG fire during the advance, which is consistent with the historical results. It was a hard-fought battle, but it is an easy win in game terms.

Another Radio Commander intro sequence, in the voice of an embedded reporter, answers my question about Coleman’s rank. Is he a grunt?

On to my third tactical scenario, this one from Radio Commander. First off, the campaign sees fit to address some of my open issues from previous steps. The cinematic intros continue, this time via commentary from a civilian reporter. We’re now clear on Coleman’s educational background and rank. What I don’t understand is whether or not an officer, provided they lead troops in the field, would have qualified as a “grunt.” Was this how the term was applied 50+ years ago? Besides that, I finally have my company up to full strength. I’m in command of three platoons instead of the usual two.

Dropped behind enemy lines, my guys need to find and trap the guerrillas.

I can’t knowledgeably comment on the historicity of this scenario. The action is too small and, frankly, too uneventful to be notable. It is certainly possible that something very similar happened at this time and place, but to verify or disprove that would take more effort than I’m willing to put in. I strongly suspect, instead, that this is yet another example of making a scenario that encapsulates key points from the larger battle, but at a scale more appropriate for the game.

Operation Junction was the largest airborne operation in the Vietnam War. By Vietnam, the U.S was seeing the need for parachute drops being, well, dropped in favor of helicopter insertions. The drop of 845 paratroopers was only a small part of the overall operation, but a noteworthy part. In my (above) operational game, I missed my chance to use the 173rd in their paradrop role. As I was reading the instructions, I actually inserted the second battalion of the 503rd via helicopter before I realized they were supposed to use an air drop. I probably lost some mission points for this, but given that I had more than enough helicopter transport to go around, my way was likely more effective otherwise.

The Radio Commander scenario, Hammer and Anvil, has an early AM drop of your subordinate company. Once in position, they are to push the enemy toward waiting mechanized elements of the 196th Brigade. This small-scale drop takes place about a month after the historical airborne operation. My gut tells me there was nothing that actually corresponds to this configuration of forces.

Herding cats. Armed, communist cats.

That aside, the scenario is an interesting in terms of its different approach. In this go-around, the objective is not to engage and defeat the enemy, the trick is to force them to move in the direction that you want them to. In doing this, there are plenty of things that can go wrong. You can miss them entirely, as you pass by them in the jungle. They can slip around your flanks or through the holes in your forces, escaping out of the operational area. They can achieve sudden, local superiority and teach you a nasty lesson. In short, it reflects the experiences of America’s large-formation operations against the insurgency.

There also seems to be, tucked away, a scripted event meant to advance a story line about war crimes. I’ll avoid commenting too much… for now. I will say that fictional battlefield atrocities seems like a cheap way to make a point, particularly if it is untethered to reality either through actual events or at least statistical occurrence.

That bit aside, I’d say all four of these scenarios provide some useful insight into various aspects of this operation, even if none of them are quite the gaming challenge that one might be hoping for.

*As is often the case, it is hard to pin down what segment of the battle, exactly, is represented by the scenario. The battle went on for something like 4-5 hours before massive air power drove off the VC. Despite the effectiveness of mechanized units against the assault, it is estimated that the bulk of the enemy losses were due to airstrikes.

Happy New Year

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the fifty-seventh 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.

A new year deserves a new year in my gaming world as well. Time to move from 1966 into 1967 and the Year of Big Battles. Surprisingly given the phrase used to describe this phase of the war, there are no operation-scale, big-battle scenarios – either in The Operational Art of War (TOAW) or within the other games I’ve been playing. Perhaps this is because, once the U.S. got its big battles, they wound up being, more often than not, entirely one-sided. Against full-scaled U.S. operations, the insurgents either fled or got walloped.

So it looks like I’ve got an array of 1967 scenarios that are fairly similar to what we saw for 1966. Despite that, who doesn’t want to mark the passage of time. And who better to herald the New Year than the United States Marine Corps?

The Marines are chasing some guerrillas into the hills in the southern part of Quang Nam. Note that I have both artillery and air support.

The next scenario in the Vietnam Combat Operations series, this time Volume V, starts of the 1st of January 1967 and covers the first half of the year. Although January 1967 saw operations all up and down Vietnam, we’ll focus in on the Quang Nam province in the center of the I Corps zone. The focus is because this time and place, and the Operation Tuscaloosa that was active here, is also covered in Squad Battles: Vietnam.

In my version of Tuscaloosa (see screenshot above), I encountered some unknown insurgent activity a bit further south from the battle that actually took place. The river crossing marked Go Noi indicates an island that was a Viet Cong stronghold and it was near here that the Marines in Operation Tuscaloosa fought a bloody battle. Given the variability of Vietnam Combat Operations and the fog of war, I ended up on a different river. Over a period of a couple of weeks I have been bringing in reinforcements so that, by the time of the screenshot, I have 3 battalions engaged plus artillery and air support. It’s a bigger operation than the historical one. Still, its nice to feel a connection of sorts.

Ambushed while crossing the river.

The battle portrayed in Squad Battles: Vietnam is split into two scenarios. The fight took place on January 26th, 1967, when two companies of Marines were ambushed as they attempted to cross the Thu Bon River. The point that they had chosen for the crossing had a large (500m wide) sandbar which separated two branches of the river. While the Marines had plans prepared for the possibility that their crossing would be contested, they were not aware that the VC had the entire sandbar targeted from entrenched positions on the south bank of the river.

The first scenario in this pair has you commanding one company of Marines just as they are ambushed by the Viet Cong. The Marine plan, on encountering resistance, was to call in artillery support and then frontal-assault the enemy positions with H Company while the second company, F, moved into a flanking position on H’s left.

Fire for effect!

I am always pleased to have access to the fire support that would have been realistically available in engagements like these. In both TOAW and in Squad Battles, I feel that indirect fire is less effective in the game than it was in reality. Author John Culbertson, who fought in Operation Tuscaloosa and wrote a book about this engagement, estimates around 50% casualties from the 155 mm fire. It can be hard to tell with fog-of-war settings on, but Squad Battles casualties from artillery seem to stay within the single digits, percentage-wise.

There’s no way that I can take the enemy-held objectives, but I feel like I have to do something.

As my artillery support ended, there were still a handful of turns left and I had a strong position on what appeared to be the enemy’s right flank. If this weren’t a one-off scenario, I’d have been tempted to wait for air support or reinforcements. There weren’t enough turns remaining in the game to take the two additional objectives (seen in the above screenshot near the center of the enemy line and in the village behind his left wing), so assaulting the enemy position seems more like an easy way to squander victory points than a game-winning strategy. On the other hand, waiting out the scenario’s end would be boring and so, seeing as I had a tactical advantage, I crossed the second branch of the river and attacked.

It is not clear from the scenario setup whether the forces in this scenario are supposed to represent H company or the flanking F company. Perhaps it is a scaled-down version of the entire two-company fight. In the historical battle, H Company was ordered, following the artillery bombardment, to frontal-assault the enemy positions. Supported by flanking fire from F, they were able to overrun the VC trenches. There were 55 Marine causalities during the battle, a steep price to pay for a sandbar. 57 VC bodies were found and another 60-70 were estimated to have been killed but removed.

Not having read any account of the battle before I played, I did not strive to duplicate that historical result. Despite being considerably more timid than the actual commander, I was still able to achieve a minor victory per Squad Battle‘s scoring.

The counter-attack is a more typical company versus company engagement. No support here.

After the crossing had been secured, the VC battalion headquarters was determined to be located in the village of Le Bac. The second of the two scenarios has a rather typical company-on-company assault scenario. It is better than some of the jungle scenarios in that the relatively open terrain allows for reasonable maneuver.

For this second scenario, the artillery support is absent, although it was still available and still used in the actual assault. In the historical attack on the village, the artillery was decisive. The Marine advance through the village consisted more of mopping up the dazed survivors of the artillery barrage as opposed to the house-to-house fighting that Squad Battles requires for victory. Requiring the player to fight for the village makes for a much more interesting game then watching the artillery do all the work for you, so this is one difference I won’t complain about.

Happy 1967 and Happy 2020.

Pacifier

Tags

Campaigns of the Vietnam War, Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, Road to Disaster, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Taking the Offensive: October 1966–September 1967, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the forty-seventh 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.

To those who saw Vietnam as a growing failure, the results from from the battlefields of 1966-1967 demonstrated that failure. Road to Disaster describes the the strategy of seeking large-scale engagements as “attrition,” and as a fight that Westmoreland was clearly losing. The narrative is that U.S. commander through this period in adding more troops to the fray was simply throwing good lives after sunk costs. His repeated requests for increases came on top of a decided lack of progress. In other words, while he could show nothing so far he would claim that “just 100,000 more soldiers” would turn the stalemate into a victory.

There is another side of this argument. At the time, Westmoreland’s claim was that he was showing substantial improvement and that the additional troops would hasten the achievement of victory for the U.S. The numbers, it was said, showed solid progress, particularly in contrast to the year before. It was asserted that the ability of the communists to continue the war was being steadily degraded. While that assertion seems to have been proven entirely wrong by the Tet Offensive in 1968, I don’t think it is quite as far-fetched as it might seem in retrospect.

Taking the Offensive: October 1966–September 1967 gives a counterpoint to Road to Disaster‘s tale of disaster. This version not dominated by the ultimate failure to save South Vietnam and the anti-war post-analysis that is so prevalent today. This is now the third in the five-part Campaigns of the Vietnam War, a booklet-type format summarizing the major phases of the U.S. Army involvement in Vietnam. Compared to the first two, it is considerably less dramatic. For the most part, it summarizes the Army’s operations, breaking them down by region. Perhaps more interesting here is the Analysis section at the tail-end of the book.

That analysis is generally positive about the performance of the Army during this period, a sharp contrast to the gloomy outlook of Road to Disaster. Whereas VanDeMark cites the “attrition” strategy as utter failure, both in general and particularly through 1967, Taking the Offensive explicitly calls it successful. As evidence it cites the 10:1 loss ratio between insurgent and U.S. forces. In the first nine months of 1967, there were 66,000 communist deaths compared to 10,000 South Vietnamese forces and 7,000 U.S. servicemen. Furthermore, they calculate a disparity in replacement rates, after which the U.S. force rose by 66,000 while the communist forces declined by 20,000. Another metric cited is the percentage of the rural population living under the government’s control rose from 44% to 48%.

Part of that latter figure is related to the relocation of civilians to refugee camps in secure areas. Even Taking the Offensive acknowledges the problem with tracking, as a good thing, the creation of refugees by forcible removal from their home villages. By the numbers, it both increases the population under government control as well as denying the communists the resources (whether provided voluntarily or under duress) that they would obtain from the local population. While Road to Disaster goes into considerably more detail about the inability of the South Vietnamese government to care for refugees, Taking the Offensive refers to the “squalid refugee camps” “straining the ability of provincial administrators to care for” the refugees which contribute to the ostensibly positive pacification numbers.

One final area where Taking the Offensive and Road to Disaster diverge is in their assessment of the health of that South Vietnamese government. Road to Disaster paints a rather bleak picture of a dysfunctional system. The rather-compelling conclusion is that saving South Vietnam was simply impossible due to a government that simply was unworthy of popular support. Worse still, it seems that there simply wasn’t anyone competent waiting in the wings. One might conclude that the War in Vietnam was essentially lost with the removal and assassination of Diệm, who for all of his faults, may have been a capable administrator. This fits with the story of Road to Disaster which is analyzing the failure of the Kennedy administration to do what it should have known was right. In this case, it seemed that they would have put a halt to U.S. support for the coup, had they just got themselves a little better coordinated. Taking the Offensive, on the other hand, talks about “the growing political stability of the South Vietnamese state.”

The campaign in Binh Dinh, where the 1st Cavalry moved in to again clear areas near the populous coast of insurgent forces, is included in Taking the Offensive, but only to introduce the situation of mid-1967. The U.S goals in targeting the province in the fall of 1966 occur too late for the series’ previous installment and apparently too late to feature in the current one. In the more detailed Combat Operations series, operation Irving is in the Stemming the Tide book, it coming right on the transition between defensive and offensive operations. Within that context, Stemming the Tide doesn’t tie the operation into the pre-Tet offensive campaign in terms of impact. It does give the military details, which are a primary source for the Vietnam Combat Operations TOAW scenarios. Nevertheless, Vietnam Combat Operations Vol. 4, per its subtitle (Counteroffensive II), it is grouped with the U.S. offensive actions that extend through 1967.

1st Cavalry deploys to the Binh Dinh coastline to search the Kim Son Valley.

The TOAW scenario steps through the phases of the American search for the 3rd PAVN Division in Binh Dinh province. You are instructed to create a headquarters at LZ Hammond (the highlighted hex, above, near the center of the screen) and allocate your forces in a mix – some active and some in reserve. As I described earlier, executing the historical operations grants you extra points towards your score. It also sets you up to properly trigger engagements with the enemy as they should occur historically. Of course, and this is the point isn’t it, it also lets you choose to alter those historical engagements.

After making themselves scarce in the Kim Son Valley, the 95th Battalion attacks my base at LZ Hammond

For example, as I was beginning to redeploy my forces away from Kim Son and into the mountainous area just west of Hoa Hoi (see the red victory point flag on the coast), a sizable enemy force showed up just outside LZ Hammond. Historically, this was a ten-minute bombardment that occurred in the middle of the night, notable (mostly) for the damage it caused. One American serviceman was killed and 32 were wounded, while 17 aircraft were damaged. Searching for the enemy turned up nothing; they were gone by morning.

In my pretend version, I moved all the forces that I could spare in an attempt to trap the attacking enemy near my strong point. It’s a level of reaction entirely out of place for 10 minutes worth of mortaring, no matter how destructive that fire may have been. Now an operational level treatment doesn’t go into that kind of detail – I can’t distinguish between an attack by mortar crews as opposed to an attempt at infantry overrun. From my perspective in TOAW, I had identified a large (potentially superior) enemy formation and therefore I planned to destroy it. It’s an interaction closer to what really occurred near the coast when multiple companies of communist forces were pinned down in the village of Hoa Hoi.

The Hoa Hoi scenario specifically includes the command helicopter of Lt. Col. George W. McIlwain,

That most significant battle of this campaign, that engagement at the village of Hoa Hoi, is presented as a scenario pair in Squad Battles: Tour of Duty. The scenarios were put together by John Tiller himself, so I was again looking forward to seeing the engine put to its best use. Obviously, with only two steps to the scenario, it is not the breaking down of the battle into key parts which worked so well before. The two scenarios correspond, more or less, to two major phases in the historical battle. In the first phase, the U.S. command was made aware of a communist presence in Hoa Hoi but had no idea to what extent. A platoon was inserted to determine what was there. When the platoon met significant resistance they soon realized that they were facing a numerically-superior force.

Of considerably more interest are the Huey gunships.

The first scenario portrays the insertion of a platoon into a hot Landing Zone. As is typical for Squad Battles, it ignores any landing zone preparatory bombardment (no off-board artillery here), but does allow you to designate your LZ “on the fly,” so to speak. In the two preceding screenshots, you can see my helicopters approaching the area around the village, coming in from the south. Instead, I flew them around to the northeast (see below).

Perhaps the highlight of this scenario is shown in the second of the two above screens. The insertion is supported by two Huey gunships with rockets. To me, this allows something closer to what an American unit in a contested landing might expect in terms of air and artillery support.

I felt better about losing my two gunships when I began the second scenario and saw the wrecks of all three aircraft from the prior scenario.

Unfortunately, my use of those gunships ended up in some embarrassment for my command. Even before I could get my guys landed, I lost both of the air-support helicopters to enemy fire. Both in the real calculus of that war and in terms of victory points, whatever the success of the infantry’s mission, that significant loss of assets is not going to look good on paper. I did, in fact, do pretty well with this scenario once you set aside the downed helicopters, but losing two “vehicles” meant a loss on points. My sense of failure was mitigated somewhat in that when the second scenario is loaded, all three helicopters from the first scenario on present on the map as wrecks. I have not read that the actual battle had significant cost in terms of support aircraft. In particular, I would think if the command helicopter would have been shot down during the operation, that would have been notable. I don’t know if John Tiller had sources that I didn’t read, or he was just starting you at what seemed to be a likely outcome of playing that first scenario.

That second phase of the battle includes the final assault on the village with a full battalion of troopers. The second scenario in the pair begins with the helicopter lift of those forces and ends with successful (or not) capture of the village. In this, the scenario has the features that I complained about in the single-scenario battles. The reinforcement and, ultimately, replacement of the initial platoon began shortly after the fighting started, a soon as U.S. commanders realized what they faced. Yet, despite a desire to take out the enemy quickly (before they had a chance to make their escape during the night), the final attack could not be organized before night fell. The assault and capture of the village actually took place the following day, using forces that were encamped overnight around the village.

What this highlights for me is the inability of these games, or any games, to determine the conditions under which history could be changed in the Vietnam War. Whether or not, in a particular campaign or battle, a player can beat history seems not to be what would tilt the outcome to a victory. Assuming one accepts the premises of Road to Disaster, they key factors resided in the political. U.S. politics, in terms of the extent to which the Johnson presidency was willing to risk drawing in China or the Soviet Union into a broader war. Also South Vietnamese politics as, ultimately, a military victory could only be sustained if it was followed up by good governance which would gain the support of the people. Many of the best Vietnam War games do model these political factors and the “morale” impacts that determine the support of the people. In all cases, though, the results of these calculations and whether they result in the player “winning” or “losing” the war, depend entirely on the assumptions that the game designer creates. Would pursuing retreating insurgents into Laos force the North to the negotiating table or cause the Chinese to send in ground forces? The best we can do is speculate.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles or move forward to a book review.

Can’t You Hear the Thunder?

Tags

ANZAC, Australia, Cold War, Men at Work, New Zealand, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations, wargames, WinSPMBT

This is the forty-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.

For much of 1965 and the early months of 1966, the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), 1st Battalion, fought as a part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the U.S. army, engaging the enemy in the vicinity of Saigon. After a year in Vietnam, the 1st Battalion returned to Australia, being replaced by the 1st Australian Task Force. The 1st ATF was a brigade-sized unit which could operate independently of the 173rd. Under Australian command, the 1st ATF contained both Australian and New Zealand forces.

After their arrival, the 1st ATF and its two infantry battalions, the 5th and 6th of the RAR, established a base at Nui Dat, in the Phước Tuy Province, south and east of Saigon. The location placed them so as to interfere with Viet Cong supply routes and nearby a suspected VC base area. The force was tasked with securing the area around Nui Dat, protecting the local population and government from VC harassment, as well as supporting the bigger picture in the III Corps tactical zone (the area outside of Saigon). From their initial deployment, there was intelligence warning of a VC attack of up-to-four-battalion strength .

While the 1st ATF pursued the rumors of enemy formations throughout the late spring and early summer, it wouldn’t be until mid-August that significant contact was made. While the evidence of large VC units in the vicinity continued to build, fighting was, at its most expansive, in company-sized engagements. Follow-through never managed to locate the suspected enemy positions. On the night of August 16th, into the morning of the 17th, the base at Nui Dat came under heavy mortar attack, once again indicating a significant enemy presence nearby.

Three Viet Cong formations are detected north and east of Nui Dat. This may be more than the Aussies want to confront on their own.

Naturally, the scenario Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume IV, depicts this encounter and the subsequent operations around Nui Dat. The fight also is shown in detail within a pair of scenarios from Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (SPMBT). This gives an opportunity to offer some thoughts on the limits of The Operational Art of War (TOAW) to depict the ground covered by Vietnam Combat Operations.

If you look at the above screenshot, you can see that two VC battalion-sized units are identified in the vicinity of Nui Dat (best located via the 1st ATF headquarters unit at the center of the shot – with an ATF in the center of its graphic). A third, and stronger, enemy unit is located to the east. This additional intelligence may be due to my adventurousness. Feeling pretty confident that the area around Nui Dat was secure ahead of the historical schedule, I pushed west to contest a village, Xuyên Mộc. An ARVN airborne unit holds that strong point and the ahistorical location of that force may be providing additional intelligence.

The point of this detail is that, to my TOAW eye (such as it is), it looks to me that I am facing a superior enemy force. It is speculated that the VC were planning an attack as they knew that the the 5th RAR was operating away from the immediate vicinity of the Australian base. In response to the possibility of being attacked, the Australians sent out company-strength patrols (companies of the 6th RAR) to, once again, attempt to locate the enemy formations. However, the mechanics of TOAW suggest I do differently. Given the knowledge that I am facing strong enemy units, I am not going to move without superiority both in quality and number of units. You may or may not be able to see it in my screenshot, but I immediately returned the 5th RAR to the operational area by helicopter. I brought it, not back to base, but instead into a blocking position to the north of the enemy. At this point I’m trying to calculate how much ARVN support I have nearby and assessing both the practicality and necessity of bringing in U.S. forces to augment my Australians.

Initial contact in the Rubber Plantation. There appear to be a lot more of them than there are of me.

Before I go there, I decided to take advantage of the trio of tactical-level scenarios that are available to me. The first one I tried is Diggers at Work, a Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank scenario. I started with this one because the date in the scenario description is four days before the actual battle depicted, an error in the scenario write-up. It quite clearly depicts the fighting on August 18th. It begins, as the screenshot above shows, with a company strength patrol through the rubber plantation near the Australians’ base and their encountering of enemy positions. If you’re counting units, the patrol is divided into 3 platoon-strength forces, and this pictures shows the middle fork of the advance.

As I said, the scenario begins with initial contact between the advancing Australian platoons and small groups of VC. It quickly becomes apparent to the Australian player that he is facing a much larger VC force to his front. At this point I was shy of the victory locations, but felt that I had to be on the defensive against this obviously-superior force. The Australian, also around this time, receives the historical artillery support that allowed the 6th RAR to prevail against vastly superior numbers.

A reinforcing company arrives in M-113s on the enemies left flank, ready to carry the day.

The design of this scenario again brings up the question of how battles are represented in the game engine. The forces appear to be historically sized, although its not clear (neither in the historical record nor because I didn’t turn off the “fog of war” settings to examine the VC side) if the full strength of the communist formation is represented in Steel Panthers. Similarly, the size of the battlefield appears reasonable. The duration of the battle, however, is significantly compressed. The infantry transports carrying the reinforcing A Company arrived some 3 hours after the fighting first developed, almost triple the duration of the entire scenario. By contrast, in a little more than half-an-hour into the scenario we, the player, receive our reinforcements. Perhaps one way of interpreting this is that the “downtime” is stripped out of the gameplay. So the first 10 turns should not be seen as 30 minutes of clock time, but rather as the most interesting 30 minutes (out of 3 hours) for each of the 3 platoons that are engaged. In fact, one might consider that while you are fighting with all three of your platoons simultaneously, the reality you are simulating actually has these fights staggered across several hours of time. Lulls between VC attacks are likewise raced over to get to the next burst of action. In this way, reinforcements arriving half way through the scenario might make sense.

This does, of course, cause problems. I’ve mention before that the tactical-level wargames are generally restricted to the 45 minute-to-an-hour timeframe. As explained elsewhere (perhaps in the PanzerBlitz manual?) the limit on scenario duration is to bring the game to an end before the likes of ammunition shortages, fuel limits, and unit exhaustion become dominating factors. The critical elements for an operational-level game, things such as supply, are ignored in a shorter length game. In this battle, however, during the 5-6 hours in which the heavy fighting took place, ammunition resupply was a major factor. The initial patrol was sent out with just three magazines per infantryman, sacrificing fighting ability for endurance. Where the expected encounter was to consist of chasing small groups of enemies through rough terrain, having a lighter load seemed more important than being ready to engage in an extended firefight. At the same time the relief company was on the way to provide relief, command was desperately trying to get ammo resupply to the besieged platoons.

Immediately, the feel of this one is better than in Steel Panthers. The background thundershower noise probably helps a lot.

For contrast, we’ll move on to the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty representation of the same scenario, The Battle at Long Tan. By contrast this does not attempt to portray much beyond the initial contact between the searching companies the the Viet Cong positions. What this means is that the resulting game is much more plausible in terms of actual (or at least potential) fighting keeping it to that first forty-five minutes or so.

Also supporting realism, and contrasting to some of the other Squad Battles scenarios I’ve played, the Australian forces do have artillery support in the form of a single battery on call. It isn’t enough to allow the player to bring in the full impact of artillery support that was so critical in winning this battle but, if we’re sticking to that first 45 minutes, it is likely it was before most of the off-board support would come into play.

The ambiance is helped by the thundershower sounds in the background. The miserable weather was another important factor in this battle, although I can’t say how important it is in the the Squad Battles math, much less the other game engines where there is no indication that we’re caught in a storm.

From a purely gaming standpoint, the scenario isn’t so bad either. The map differs from either the jungle or the rice paddies maps that we are used to playing, so that’s a good thing. The plantation terrain helps to create much more interesting lines of sight. It allows allows the occasional long distant shot, but it also creates nooks and crannies of hidden spots, even very close by. Movement is also much more similar to the open terrain of the rice fields as opposed to the one-hex-per-turn of the jungle. In this one, the Australians have well-maintained roads along which to advance, adding to the their tactical option.

All things considered, I think Squad Battles does this fight best. That said, I imagine most of us would have a hankering for those reinforcements to come in to save the day. Without them, there is no real way to achieve a satisfying victory. One can accumulating the victory points to achieve victory, but you do so knowing that the worst is yet to come.

Here comes the human wave again.

As I indicated, the Steel Panthers scenario package contains two versions of this battle. The second scenario, Made of Stern Stuff, is correctly located in time by its scenario notes. Because of this, it ended up being the last scenario chronologically. In truth, it is simply another representation of the same battle.

I like the map better than the one in Diggers. It is more expansive and more chaotic. In Diggers, if you know what happened in the battle, you can anticipate how the scenario plays out. You know, to start, that the enemy is somewhere near the map’s victory locations. It only makes sense to advance those positions cautiously, ready to fall back on a defensive line when the enemy appears in force. Note that the line of advance is along the rows of the rubber plantation. It means there are long lines of sight which must be broken up by advancing either behind or along the trees.

Contrast that with Stern Stuff. Having just played Squad Battles, I immediately miss the dedicated plantation terrain and the much clearer graphics of that other title. However, this third scenario, using the tools at hand, creates a map that, yes, feels a bit more like a cultivated plantation rather than just wild jungle while still providing an unpredictable landscape for the battle. Lines of sight are less obvious. Also considerably less obvious, particularly at the outset (it is much more obvious by the time I took the screenshot at Turn 7), is where the enemy is. Playing the Australians, you have to begin the scenario attempting to reconnoiter the enemy’s positions. Once the shooting begins, you remain uncertain. Is the entire enemy to your front. Will they be coming around your flanks? Maybe there is another platoon or two behind you.

More support rolling in.

Steel Panthers also, in general and in this scenario in particular, shows an advantage in depicting fire support. As critical as it was in the Vietnam War, it makes a huge difference in gameplay when it works as it should. In Squad Battles‘ The Battle at Long Tan, the artillery support is from a single battery. Granted, this is very early on in the contact and it makes sense that the Australians had yet to bring the full weight of their air and artillery to bear. However, it emphasizes the weakness of artillery in Squad Battles. With a single gun, it can be difficult to do any noticeable damage with indirect fire. This is a combination of the fact that indirect guns are not particularly deadly and that it is very difficult to consistently achieve direct hits without a line-of-sight from the shooter to the target. In Stern Stuff, catching advancing VC in open ground allows them to be ripped apart by concentrated artillery fire. The trick is to have ground units that can keep track of the enemy’s movements so that artillery can be walked onto the moving targets. In this regard, this scenario gets it right, more so than any of the others.

I think this one also reinforces the idea that in a turn-based game, the “clock” can be a soft and fuzzy thing. Trying to interpret this scenario as an 90 minute slice out of the fighting August 18th fails to capture the intent of the scenario designer. Better to interpret it as bursts of 15-20 minute actions with the 30-40 minute lulls between fighting simply ignored. It would feel a lot more authentic if there were a way to acknowledge the down time and perhaps even model its effects. However, we are talking here about user-made scenarios for a long-time engine, so we shouldn’t get too greedy.

Lastly, in this version of the scenario, I get the feeling (more than the others) that it was made based upon a memoir or personal history. The named locations and other details have the feeling of being pulled from a soldier’s personal recollection of the battle. I’ve gotten used to seeing the War in Vietnam purely from the American perspective. This is one battle where there is extensive information from the Australian’s point of view. It is no wonder that it has been well covered.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles or move ahead to a book review.

Helicopter Valley

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the thirty-eighth 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.

Given my critique of the The Battle at Ap Chinh An, one would think I’d be pleased to see what was done with the two-part scenario, The Battle at Song Ngan. We’ll see. Squad Battles: Vietnam has a number of multi-part scenarios and this is the first one I’ve played, so that is one new experience for me in this article. There are also some new experiences in the next iteration of Vietnam Combat Operations, (Volume IV this time), all waiting to be discussed in the context of operations in South Vietnam on its northernmost border.

Operation Hastings was a July, 1966 effort to engage North Vietnamese regular army units that had moved across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) into South Vietnam and to force them back across the border. Intelligence placed a divisional headquarters somewhere in the Ngan river valley. The U.S. Marines was to launch helicopter assault to isolate and destroy it. During the initial insertion, three transport helicopters were downed in a collision. The losses and the wreckage earned the battlefield the moniker “Helicopter Valley.”

I find a major enemy formation in the Song Ngan valley a few days ahead of schedule.

Playing Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume IV, I encounter the enemy right where they should be, albeit a few days ahead of the historical schedule. This is one of several engagements in the opening turns of the new scenario.

One can see the improvements made as the scenario author moves through each installation in his series. The 4th iteration has new features as well as features that are just “new to me.” In that latter category I include the custom terrain mods that are used in this series both to better portray the unique Vietnam terrain and just to improve the looks of map overall. You can compare the above screen shot to almost the same area of the map showcased in my earlier article.

Another new feature addresses the issue I talked about while wrapping up that previous scenario. The way this series is designed, the transition between scenarios is, by necessity, not very smooth. Obviously, when breaking up the war per the calendar, at some point one scenario has got to end and the next will begin. There is no way around that. This time around, however, the scenario notes identify the several left-over operations so that, as a player, you can pick what was still going on in the previous game as well as kick-off your new operations. It’s another nice touch in this series. The notes also show when the various ARVN units will be available to assist in U.S. Operations, so you can plan ahead. From the get-go, the enemy seems a little more active than the last round and the South Vietnamese are a little more willing to respond, so the overall feel is that more is going on.

The communist forces also appear a little stronger. Although we can’t yet see them in the above screenshot, there are several communist forces located along the Ngan river and they are fairly beefy. Even with my U.S. airpower (which, also, is curtailed relative to the previous scenario), they’re not going to retreat from those positions easily. Furthermore, with their back to the DMZ, there is no way to for me to surround them, no matter how many extra units I’d be willing to commit.

The Marines move in from one of their two landing zones.

As I started off saying, Operation Hastings is also represented in Squad Battles: Vietnam. It is a two-part scenario, featuring snapshots from the first two days of large-unit contact, on June 15th and 16th. The scenario pair are set up to reverse the roles of the sides. On Day 1, the U.S. forces have to seize the objectives from the communists. On Day 2, they must defend.

Again, as I started with, the first of these scenarios seems to answer some of the complaints I had with my last scenario, which in many ways is very similar to this one. The U.S. Marines begin the scenario mounted on their helicopter transports. Assuming the first time with this scenario, the player’s only knowledge about the battlefield is given with the location of victory locations. This time, however, there are two victory locations indicating the two historical landing zones for the scenario. Putting the units into place (and I missed this a little, as you might tell from the above screenshot), forces the player to make the intended approaches to the enemy’s strong points. Unfortunately, while it forces the player to play a more accurate scenario, it also makes for a more tedious scenario. Particularly on these all-jungle sections of map, the game moves very slowly. Infantry on foot can only advance a single hex each turn through the jungle meaning (again, refer to the above screenshot), the scenario is just about long enough for the attackers to advance to the victory point locations. So while you, as the player, are making choices about moving and shooting, you really have very little option but to execute a head-on advance at maximum speed. Not much “strategizing” left for the player to do.

This is why they call it “Helicopter Valley.”

The second scenario starts you off after you have won the first, but more than a full day later. While the scenarios are not in any way “linked,” the time game means that the setup for Day 2 really depend on how well or poorly you’ve done on the first day. I have to say, though, that I didn’t loose that many helicopters (see above screenshot). While I had one of my transports forced down by enemy fire, and I managed a controlled landing without losing any of the personnel. Furthermore, that one I lost through the rather gamey employment of my transports to provide support fire. From a historical standpoint, that was probably a pretty stupid use of assets. As a game player, though, you learn to make use of what you’ve got.

Even more so in this case where, as in most Squad Battles scenarios, there is no off-board support. Particularly for Part 1, an assault on a known enemy position, this flies in the face of U.S. doctrine. The Marines would have (and did) pummel the communist positions with air and artillery. Once again, however, even the brigade mortar teams are missing from the U.S. order of battle.

It is also worth noting that the reason the helicopters were lost, in the real operation, was that the landing zone was too small for the operation, and two helicopters collided while attempting to off-load their troops. A third crashed while attempting to avoid the first two. The fourth, as seen in the above screenshot, was hit by enemy fire, but much later in the day than what is covered by the first scenario. They have absolutely no effect on Part 2 of the scenario; they’re just there for looks.

A role reversal. The Marines will try to defend yesterday’s battlefield from counter-attack.

That second Battle at Song Ngan scenario, unlike the first, starts with all units in place. The downed helicopters are the only transports on-map. The scenario places one U.S. Marine company defending the hilltop positions from the previous scenario while a second company moves in to support. It is during this time, after dark has fallen, that the NVA attack the American positions. Even more than the first of the two, the “strategy” component of this scenario is limited. The reinforcing company has just enough movement to get into the battle by the end, but only to support the top right objective. For the in-place company, there would seem to be little incentive to maneuver as each platoon is hard pressed enough to defend its assigned victory location.

Maybe we’ll do better next time.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles or move ahead to a book review.

La Rue Sans Joie

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Operational Art of War, The Street Without Joy, timeline, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the thirty-seventh 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.

The French named the stretch of Highway 1 from Huế to Quảng Trị “The Street without Joy.” Austrian-born American academic (and a former French resistance fighter) Bernard Fall popularized the term in 1961 by publishing a book with that same name. The name comes from the difficult terrain along the coastal highway that allowed the Viet Minh to neutralize the mechanized forces of the French in the Indochina War.

Bernard favored U.S. support of the South Vietnamese anti-communist efforts but, as the war escalated from 1964 and onward, he warned that the Americans were making the same mistakes as the French did and suffered from a failure to appreciate the nature of the conflict in which they were engaged. Fall was killed by a landmine in February, 1967 while accompany the U.S. Marines on an operation along the Street without Joy.

As the calendar pages turn, little is happening. The only brigade-level action in mid-May 1966 is a Marine search-and-destroy op in Quang Ngai.

I return to my ongoing game in Vietnam Combat Operations and focus on the U.S. Marines as the spring turns to summer in 1966. The significance of the date is perhaps appreciated only by me as it is when I chose to split my Cold War timeline into two. Otherwise, at least in this game’s version of events, the date is particularly unremarkable. In the South, the U.S. Army has been unable to make contact with any major insurgent units in weeks. In the North, the Marines are having slightly better luck. On the date in question, a joint U.S./South Vietnam Marine operation in a remote section of Quang Ngai has managed to isolate an unknown communist unit. With an entire theater’s worth of air support available to me, I will make an example out of whomever this is.

The Street. Looks quite in mid-May time frame, but in Hue, there are anti-government riots.

In the far north of South Vietnam, along the DMZ, it has been pretty quiet, through all of the first three scenarios. This, too, is an illustration of Vietnam Combat Operations‘ unique design. In nearly any wargame with active enemy contact like this, a programmed opponent is going to want to send its forces across the DMZ to saturate the area around the cities of Quảng Trị and Huế. Depending on the detail of the terrain modelling, this would be reinforced by the difficulties of getting between the two cause by limited river crossings, mountains, and other factors (and Vietnam Combat Operations models this well). Lightly garrisoning this area or otherwise not paying attention would lead to getting overwhelmed by forces based in North Vietnam.

Operation Florida searches for the 6th PAVN between the O Lau and Ho rivers.

By contrast, this scenario allows you to focus exactly on the historical scenarios. Deploying a brigade-sized force to hunt down a suspected Regiment. It is all too easy for the game to descend into an Eastern Front-style hex-and-counter clone. The very thing has happened in one of the other TOAW Vietnam scenarios. Here I can operate confidently despite “knowing” that there is a numerically-superior force near by without constantly preparing to defend against ahistorical attacks.

What appears to be a disconnect, I’m going to say, is an artifact of the simulation taking place at a level above the real “action.” Although, in defense of the typical game AI, even Westmoreland was surprised that the North hadn’t already made a play for Huế. However, much of what was actually happening on the ground was at finer detail than that modeled by even the lowest-level TOAW treatment. Small units of communists would infiltrate villages, only to scatter when U.S.- aligned forces appeared. Forcing a player to “control” (in the TOAW sense) each hex to account for the “hearts and minds” aspect of the war would both be unrealistic as well as a micromanagement hell. The more I play this scenario, the more I appreciate the work that went into getting it right.

Another interesting point in the above screenshots is the representation of the riots in Huế City with combat units. It is, of course, a trap, if you haven’t read the accompanying manual. It would be easy enough to send in the U.S. Marines to wipe out the rioters. That would also cost you a bunch of victory points while gaining you nothing. As far as I can tell, those rioters don’t cause the U.S. any harm. It makes it a little harder to move around Huế and probably impacts supply tracing as well. Given the paucity of operations further northward, there is little effect on the game – unless you’re stupid enough to slaughter them with tanks.

Operation Jay, per my game. As my Marines are hunting for the enemy formations to the north, they come from the south, hitting me in the rear.

The final turn of Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume III, has a freshly-initiated “Jay,” the U.S. Marine Corp search-and-destroy operation along the same stretch of coastline which had plagued the French. This was the only operation initiated on the next-to-last turn of the scenario and therefore is the only real action on the final turn, as shown in the above screen shot.

This got me thinking about one ramification of breaking the war up into discrete scenarios which end on a date certain. In this case, knowing that no forces on the map were earmarked for an upcoming Op., I was able to direct all the U.S. Marines from Huế City northward, into the zone where I had made contact. This had the result of doubling the number of historical forces involved which, ahistorically, allowed me to isolate not only the attackers, but their regimental headquarters operating nearby. Again, with the full airpower of the Vietnam theater available for support, I was able to eliminate one of the the units before the scenario ended. Had this not been the end of the scenario, I probably would have refrained from committing forces not earmarked for this operation simply to improve my chances of cutting off the enemy’s retreat. The reason why is that I wouldn’t want to lose access to them for an historical operation that was coming up in the next turn or two.

Of course, this is small potatoes in the scheme of things. I probably earned a couple of extra points by eliminating an extra unit in this “gamey” way, but it had no effect on victory or even a noticeable movement in the 1000s of points that are available in the scenario. For what its worth, this was, as with Volumes I and II, another draw. I’m getting better at determining where there are friendly (and idle) forces in proximity to victory point locations, which are also worth contesting. It helped that Volume III released a number of riverine units to my control, which allow an easy way to keep track of enemy movements in the Mekong Delta.

Only one battalion, but near-infinite mobility.

Squad Battles: Vietnam also includes an Operation Jay scenario, titled The Battle at Ap Chinh An. It simulates the opening hours of the operation and initial contact between the U.S. Marines and the North Vietnamese Army. As a Squad Battles scenario, it is an interesting one. As a model of the battle in question, it is considerably less so.

The scenario starts with a battalion of Marines aboard helicopter transport and some victory locations clustered around the village of Chinh An. Once again, however, it is a battalion without mortar companies, nor does the operation have any off-board air or artillery support. The free deployment, however, means is that, as the player, we are able to deploy in almost initial configuration that we want. This is definitely a departure from the Squad Battles scenarios I complained about where the path to victory is hemmed in by movement and game length.

I love it when a plan comes together. This was exactly what I intended.

You might see in the first of my (Squad Battles) screenshots, my plan is to send my three companies out to ring the objective area, allowing an attack coming from all sides. In the immediately-preceding  screenshot, it should be apparent that the plan worked quite well. I was able to land my force with the loss of only a single transport, I found no enemies outside my “ring”, and was able to tighten my noose without any unexpected opposition. The victory was complete and then some. For the first time that I can remember in a Squad Battles game, I wiped every single enemy unit from the board.

Unfortunately, as fun as that might have been, it was neither realistic nor historical. Unrealistic because the idea of having ad-hoc landing sites, subject to adjustment depending on where the enemy is encountered, is something that is difficult to imagine actually occurring within an operation. Landings were planned out ahead, typically only occurring after reconnaissance and then air and artillery preparation. The scenario probably should have, in the description, designated the landing zones (perhaps giving the player a handful of discrete choices) and suggested the player select the landing zone, or zones, before the scenario begins and stick to their decision. While a player is free to restrict himself in such away on his own, it would be difficult to do without guidance. Unless you’ve already played the scenario, it would be hard to know where on the map reasonable landing zones might be.

Secondly, the visibility of the victory locations and my knowledge about how Squad Battles scenarios are typically set up meant that I considered the entire map, outside of the area in the above screenshot, to be a safe zone. In reality, the commanders at the time likely would have made the opposite assumption. Outside of the landing zone, they would have very little confidence about areas were occupied and defended versus what lcoations were free.

On top of non-realistic aspects, this simply isn’t a fair simulation of the historical battle. In reality, the landing of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Division did take approximately the length of this scenario to complete. However, the landing itself was unopposed and well back from Ap Chinh An itself. A realistic landing zone for this Battalion (LZ Raven) would have been off the left edge of the upper screenshot, but likely still on the Squad Battles map. When the 2/4 Marines encountered resistance as they approached the village, they called in air and artillery support, attempted a flanking maneuver with one of their companies, and positioned a second Marine battalion (2nd of the 1st) off of the screenshots to the right. That second battalion encountered additional resistance at Ap My Phu and was unable to move into a position to support the attack on Ap Chinh An. By the time all this played out, the entire day had passed. The NVA managed to escape the Marine’s trap under cover of night.

As with many scenarios, this one may have meant to both use a realistic portion of the operation’s order-of-battle, but also allow the player to experience (to some extent) the larger battle. It’s a design choice and, as I said, not a bad one as far as the “fun factor” for this scenario goes. It makes it tougher on the player who was hoping to understand something about this battle.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. The next article deals with Operation Hastings, which followed shortly after Operation Jay.

Where’er We Go They Dread the Name of Garryowen

Tags

Cold War, Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the thirty-third 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.

Today, we take three or four different views of the 1st Cavalry operation in Binh Dinh that took place at the outset of 1966. This province was strategically important to the U.S. operations in Vietnam and yet, at the same time, a stronghold of communist support. Encamped somwhere in Binh Dinh was a North Vietnamese division commanding two NVA regiments and a Viet Cong regiment. The U.S. high command made uprooting this enemy a priority and the task fell, again, to the 1st Cavalry.

Operations Masher and Double Eagle, in the greater context.

There were actually two operations, conducted in concert, which were slated to target the insurgents in this area. Masher was the designation given to the 1st Cavalry operation in the Bon Song valley but, just to the north, the U.S. Marines were conducting Operation Double Eagle.

Once again, Vietnam Combat Operations provides an organized context for these operations within the wider war. Note that the “1965” part of the scenario title has been dropped as Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3 extends through the end of 1965 and into 1966. As before, it is a very different scenario experience. To play, I carefully follow along with the instructions on my tablet, meticulously completing each turn. I’m struck, as before, that the results of the game really do match the narrative I’m reading in Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide. This really shouldn’t be a complete surprise, as the Vietnam Combat Operations documents cite Stemming the Tide as a source.

By mid-February, my fighting has shifted to the Kim Son Valley, where I’ve located a VC and and NVA division.

It does say something for the skill of the scenario designer that the game engine is playing along properly. Note that in the first screenshot, I’ve located one of the NVA regiments near the coast in the northern part of the province, similarly to how the historic operation progressed. More impressively, the fighting moved south, between the first and second screenshots, pretty much on the historic timetable. In this grand operational scenario, I’m in the right place at the right time.

I also continue to be pleased with the way combat happens when and where it is supposed to but doesn’t happen where it shouldn’t which, as I’ve said before, seems very difficult to engineer in a TOAW scenario. For the first time for me as I play this series, the pace is picking up. While Operation Masher (by now, it was relabeled Operation White Wing as Johnson found terms like “Masher” a little too violent and bad for public relations) is the largest engagement across the entire map, I have several more smaller engagements, involving both U.S. and South Vietnamese -only forces. I’ve wound up stretching the limits of my air support to cover all the fights adequately.

Opening moves for Operation Masher at a finer scale.

The original scenario set for The Operational Art of War also had a scenario for Operation Masher/White Wing called Bong Son 1966. The scenario name is a reference to the provincial capitol, which was centrally located relative to the actions in this operation. The “Battle of Bong Son” is also used as a descriptor for the first phase of the campaign which included the first insertion points and the initial fighting for the 1st Cavalry, first near the city and then around the “Bong Son Plain” to its north.

The scale of this scenario is similar to the early 1st Cavalry foray in Ia Drang. Somehow, though, it captures the feel of the operation much better (again, using Stemming the Tide to set expectations) than the earlier scenario did. Significantly, the setup of the scenario means that I follow a similar path through the province as the actual fighting did, moving from North to South as the turns go by. There is significantly less of the feeling that the historical order of battle is simply scattered across the map, leading to an entirely ahistorical set of fights.

But it still isn’t perfect. Or, to put it another way, it doesn’t live up to the feeling of Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3. Most significantly, the enemy is all over and ubiquitous. The scenario introduction explains how the ARVN forces were given the task of holding open the coast, freeing up the US forces to hunt for communist forces inland. Very quickly, however, my ARVN units were under threat in the southern part of the map while my 1st Cavalry forces were getting pinned down in the north. It seems I had chosen my landing spots a little too far apart and the enemy was threatening to smash me, piecemeal. You can kind of see this in the above screenshot. Sort of. If you know what you are looking for.

The real operation was characterized by an inability of the US to find the communists. There were many instances where the US was sure they had nailed down the location of at least one of the targeted regiments. Airmobile forces were inserted to find and fight the enemy while specifically trying to prevent him from slipping away from battle. Yet time and time again the US forces would come up empty handed. To this day it isn’t known for sure, in many cases, whether the insurgents slipped through the holes in the 1st Cavalry’s blocking force or whether the intelligence on their whereabouts was bad from the get-go. What we do know, however, is if the enemy found himself at an advantage, he would fight.

With this context, Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3, captures it all much better as, most of the time, you’re staring at an empty map and wondering where the enemy is. In Bong Son 1966, the enemy seems to be everywhere and often in superior numbers to your own. While I think it is less accurate, it does capture a certain feel of the Vietnam War. As a US commander, it must have seemed like if you made even a small slip-up and left a company somewhere unsupported, the NVA or VC were bound to appear and extract payment for your oversight.

Into the Kim Son Valley. Note also the major NVA forces along the coast.

There is another characteristic of the TOAW system that, although I’ve complained about it before, seems to work here. The ideal operation would have the US move into an area and try to fix the enemy position and destroy it. When the US were unable to completely blocked all the retreat routes out of the battle area, the communists seemed to inevitably find a way to escape the trap. In this, the TOAW mechanic, which often requires that all six hexes surrounding a unit be occupied in order to win a battle decisively, seems to capture the necessity, in Vietnam’s operations, to thoroughly engulf the enemy before an attack.

In terms of capturing the right feeling, it works better than I expected it would have.

The Bong Son 1966 scenario also provides another segue, allowing us to drop down one more level of detail into Squad Battles: Tour of Duty‘s depiction of this operation.

A zoomed out view shows most of the active battlefield in a single screen.

The Squad Battles scenario, called The Battle at Kim Son, is configured to take place on February 16th. The scenario notes don’t make it clear whether this is to recreate an actual portion of the battle from detailed reports or just be representative of the type of encounters that were occurring in this time and place. Trying to match up with the narrative in Stemming the Tide, it is possible that this reproduces an encounter that 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry had while trying to set up blocking positions during a sweep of an area called the “Iron Triangle.” Certainly this designation is to be confused, by future generations, with the other Iron Triangle, north and west of Saigon. But in this “Iron Triangle” battle, a company of the 2/5 encountered NVA forces entrenched on high ground while attempting to move into their assigned position.

Once again, this scenario seems to be lacking the available artillery support that proved decisive in so many fights. At least, this time, you have access to the U.S. command’s mortar support. The battle also has a large enough force and the tactical decisions that I noted are needed to make these scenarios work.

I didn’t do all that well in my play-through, getting my effort scored as a minor defeat. I did manage to take two out of three objectives (often enough for a win in Squad Battles) but I also took more losses than I inflicted. In a war where victory was determined by kill ratios, this is a significant failure. I think my biggest mistake is that I should have used smoke, from my mortars, to help close in on the enemy without taking losses. Alas, smoke it rarely (if ever) included as a mortar option in Squad Battles setups.

Part of me wouldn’t mind retrying the scenario with a better strategy in mind. However, I’d run into that problem with so many of these scenarios. A large part of the challenge is that I didn’t know what I was facing. Do I need to hold a force in reserve for defensive purposes? Where is the strongest portion of the enemy force? Having played once, I now know the answers and the joy of discovering that is lost. It also is much easier to win a scenario if you know where all the surprises are waiting.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Up next, a Wall St. Journal article puts the Vietnam War in a context of Domino Theory.

Ambuscade

Tags

Battle of Ia Drang, Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young

This is the thirtieth 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.

The day after securing Landing Zone X-Ray, American units moved out and away from the battlefield on foot. Having defending the landing zone decisively, a B-52 strike was called in on the Chu Pong Mountain, where their North Vietnamese opponents remained dug in, while the Americans moved safely away from the bombing targets. Doctrine dictated that friendly forces be outside of a 3 km safety zone. A march, rather than a helicopter evacuation, would provide less indication to the enemy that the airstrikes were coming.

The two battalions were to march to two other areas. The 2/5 was to assemble at LZ Columbus and the 2/7 split off and headed for LZ Albany.

After reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it remains unclear to me what the bigger plan was. The men of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been sent into LZ X-Ray as to reinforce Moore’s battalion as the fight developed. They had been marching and fighting for over 50 hours straight as they made their way to Albany. In some cases, the unit orders indicated that their goal was assemble at LZ Albany to be evacuated from the combat area. Others suggest that Albany may, instead, have been a temporary halting point, and a further march would follow. Some commanders’ orders indicated they were to expect to encounter the enemy in the vicinity of Albany while others anticipated an uneventful march followed by a ride back to base camp.

Whatever the higher-ups thought would happen, its seems clear that the North Vietnamese were far more prepared and organized than the Americans understood. Shortly after noon, as the lead elements of the 2/7 were arriving at the clearing designated Albany, an NVA ambush hit them all up and down the marching column.

Here they come. My lead elements have made it the “copse of trees” in the center of the clearing, but they’re going to be stuck there, alone.

As the scenario opens, I get a feeling of “being there” that exceeds most Steel Panthers scenario implementations. The map feels like a reasonable depiction of the ambush area, based on Moore’s description, and the sudden appearance of enemies from everywhere at once and my almost instant inability to respond is very much what happened. My own situation quickly became worse than the historical situation. When the attack commenced, I moved my command units forward in the landing zone into the “copse of trees,” as shown in the above screenshot. While things don’t look too bad so far, in was only another 10 or 15 minutes before everyone forward was wiped out along with any other unit who tried to cross the clearing.

Following the scenario instructions, I attempted to move all my subordinate commanders backwards to reunite them with their commands. This turned out to be another big mistake. In the actual fight, only one commander, Captain Forrest of the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, returned to his unit. The 1/5 was at the rear of the column and Forrest sprinted the distance to return to get his people organized. In my game, not a single headquarters unit survived long enough to make to their “zone.” By about 10 turns in, there are no longer any command units remaining on the map.

I’m really feeling surrounded and helpless. This is one heck of a fight.

As the battle progresses, though, some of the usual Steel Panthers problems creep in. I’m realizing in some of the Vietnam scenarios (where I have a detailed written account of the battle to compare), the time as determined by turn number probably shouldn’t be taken literally. In most of these battles, there are various lulls in the action as the attacking side regroups and prepares for a fresh assault. In most tactical games, however, the player needs to maximize the pace of his attacks if he wants to get the most victory points within a fixed turn count. So, for example, at Ap Bau Bang, where the Viet Cong attacked in several waves, one might image that a turn or two of “quiet” could, in fact, represent a much longer pause between attacks. Nevertheless, there are limits to such an indulgence.

At LZ Albany, there was a good hour of chaos before US forces could organize a defense. Just like the American battalion was caught by surprise, brigade and division support were also unprepared. It took about that long for air support to be called into the area, followed soon after by artillery. In the game, however, air and artillery support is delayed by only two turns (six minutes), plus a few more turns for the requested support to respond. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to allow that with this distortion of time, the scenario still reasonably simulates the confusion immediately following the VC assault.

On the other hand, it took all afternoon and into the evening until it was determined that LZ Albany was secure enough to allow reinforcements by helicopter. With the attack beginning about noon, it was near 6PM before helicopters brought in men and supplies  and began to evacuated wounded. Yet, on the computer, an additional company (and then some, I think) is flying in on helicopters before that first hour is up.

This goes too far to be considered just a “distortion” in the clock. The only way that I might be able to square that circle is if I read deeply between the lines within the scenario instructions. It is possible, I suppose, that if the U.S. had completely secured LZ Albany at the outset of the attack, reinforcements via helicopter could have come in much sooner. Of course, I don’t know how one might determine what would have made the landing zone safe, nor does this scenario have any kind of dependency of that sort. In my case, I figured there was no way I was getting my helicopters safely down in the main landing zone and, instead, I found a three-hex clear spot near the center of my column (it’s just left of center in the above screenshot). So, in addition to the timing, I’m landing forces in an area that, in reality, is way too small to support them. Even when a perimeter was finally established in the Albany clearing, it was initially too small to support helicopter landings. A hex, at this map’s scale, just wouldn’t do.

Another problem impacts all ambush-type scenarios and “base defense” settings in general. Steel Panthers has a system of automatic retreat when a unit begins to waiver. The idea is that a unit will back away from the line of fire, often using smoke to cover its retreat, and do this during the enemy’s turn. On a good day, particularly if you’ve retreated back into the security of your own lines, that unit can recover morale and cohesion and perhaps get back into the fight. On the other hand, if the unit is cut off or surrounded, retreating will only expose it to additional fire and eventual destruction.

In this scenario, however, where there is an inner defense of Americans beset on all sides by attacking North Vietnamese, there is no clear “backwards” direction. What is, on one side of the perimeter, a retreat to safety is to units on the other side a blind charge into enemy lines. This is exactly the fate of many units in this scenario, both U.S. and NVA. Units wavering will advance towards and often through the enemy lines to inevitably be eliminated. In fact, it seemed like a fairly decent percentage of unit losses, on both side, were due to them wandering out of cover, stunned, right into the fire of their enemies. On a small scale, one can write it off as simply a higher lethality of fire, and ignore the details. Happening so regularly, it is frustrating.

By the end of the scenario, I was left less impressed than I was at the start. These oddities detracted from that feeling, at the outset, that this one was coming close to getting things just right. But it is still a well-done attempt.

The WinSPMBT map seems a bit too big, but this one looks too small. The scenario seems to small as well.

Switching over the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, the most obvious difference is the size of the map. Comparing, side-by-side, features depicted by these two programs should look similar on the screen. Steel Panthers uses 50m hexes and Squad Battles features 40m hexes. If anything, that should expand Squad Battles to be the larger of the two.

When I first opened up the Squad Battles take, however, my thought was that this one is the correct scale. Accounts describe as LZ Albany as a fairly small clearing, even compared to the other sites in the Battle of Ia Drang. The Steel Panthers version did just seem too expansive, although the obviousness of the error didn’t hit me until I saw the Squad Battles take. Setting helicopters down in Albany was challenging enough. Finding 3-hex landing zones all along the trail tells me the map was a little too detailed.

As I played, though, I realized that the scenario feels too cramped. Part of it, yes, was coming off Steel Panthers, which set my expectations just so. However, as I’ve been playing, I’ve also been reading Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide. While fighting the Squad Battles LZ Albany scenario, I plunged forward to the section on LZ Albany in the book and found the battlefield dimensions given therein. Captain Forrest, it is written, had to advance 500-600m from the position of his company at the rear of the column to meet with commander Colonel McDade, at its head. This figure roughly matches the total size of the battlefield in Squad Battles.

Stemming the Tide also describes the LZ Albany clearing as such: “An irregular square from three hundred to four hundred meters in length and width, the landing zone had a grove at its center measuring about one hundred fifty meters west to east and one hundred meters north to south.”

Counting hexes, so you don’t have to, the Steel Panthers map has the “grove” just about right, but has way too much clearing surrounding it. For the Squad Battles map, it is almost as if someone found somewhere the size of the grove and assumed that those dimensions were for the total clearing. On that map, the “grove” is but a single hex (40×40), covered in the screenshot by Colonel “Lopez.”

The feeling of being “too small” extends to other areas. To simulate the ambush, initially all U.S. forces are “fixed” – they cannot be moved by the player. This is intended to simulate the surprise factor in the ambush, which is fine as far as it goes. Some units remain fixed even by the scenario’s end. Again, the idea may be that some of the column remained unable to maneuver throughout the first 45 minutes of fighting (5 minute turns, 9 turns). But removing a percentage of the units from the control of the player makes for that much less of a “game.”

Defense of the LZ clearing is accomplished primarily through air-delivered napalm strikes.

Even those units that are there already seem a subset of the American forces. Missing is any off-board artillery support. Granted that came after the air strikes, which are part of the game, but it is a noticeable omission particularly for someone who has just completed the Steel Panthers take. Also missing are the mortar companies that were part of the 1st Cavalry company structure, as well as any other support platoons that one finds (accurately or not, it is hard to say) in Steel Panthers.

Along with everything else that went missing between Steel Panthers and Squad Battles, gone also is the sense of narrative. In Steel Panthers, as I said, there is that sense of shock and confusion. There is the mad rush to seize the grove and to reunite the command structure. Then the air and artillery begin to arrive, and you can attempt to organize your defense. Chronologically, the Squad Battles version is probably the more accurate one, but it doesn’t bring the player into the battle.

Just to wrap up this post, I’ll toss in one more screenshot for the Plieku Campaign, this time from Boonie Rats 1965-1972. The last time I was playing it, I halted just before the major November Army operations, with the intent to return later. Having brought Campaign for South Vietnam through into 1966, I thought I’d just catch up Boonie Rats to the same date.

Leaving operation planning to the computer means that the NVA struck Pleiku, not Plei Me, in late November 1965.

Notable here, in the above screenshot, is the drift away from the historical Plieku Campaign (and the direction of that drift). You can see, if your eyes are sharp, that the NVA (gold highlight on red) has launched a major operation against Plieku City itself, defended only by ARVN (red highlight, with yellow on a tan background). The recently-deployed-from-the-US 1st Cavalry is riding to the rescue, but in this case is assembling in force to save the provincial capital, rather helping to lift the siege of a military outpost. I’d say the ahistorical situation is a result of the natural aggressiveness of the Operational Art of War programmed opponent and the hex-and-counter mechanics that emphasize taking territory.

Consider it one more data point showing what works and what doesn’t in TOAW.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. The next article discusses a book on this period of the War.

Up and Up

Tags

Cold War, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam 1965-1975

This is the twenty-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.

I finally swung back around to pick up the last of the large-scale Vietnam War scenarios for The Operational Art of War. This one is called Campaign for South Vietnam and covers the war stretching from May 1965 to April 1975 (give or take, depending on certain scenario parameters). Campaign for South Vietnam takes Operational Art in an unexpected direction, adding in strategic-level decisions atop the operational engine. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that the strategic level is the game and the actual, TOAW combat resolution is just discovering the implications of your strategic-level decisions.

If this is reminiscent of my commentary on Vietnam 1965-1975, this should be no surprise. Campaign for South Vietnam has its roots in converting the old board game to TOAW. At some point in its development, the TOAW scenario took on is own personality. The mechanics of Vietnam 1965-1975 would never convert over one-for-one and this scenario builder doesn’t try, but neither does he make any secret that he borrowed heavily from the Victory Games design.

TOAW Scenarios

Vietnam 1965-1968

Hex side: 5 km
Turn length: 1 week
Unit: Battalion/regiment

Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Vol. 1

Hex side: 4 km
Turn length: 1 week
Unit: Company/battalion

Boonie Rats 1965 – 1972

Hex side: 10 km
Turn length: 1 month
Unit: Regiment

Campaign for South Vietnam

Hex side: 5 km
Turn length: 1 month
Unit: Battalion

Vietnam 1965-1975

Hex side: 10 km
Turn length: 2 turns per season
Unit: Battalion/regiment

One disclaimer I’ll toss in up front is that I am playing with the version of the scenario that shipped with TOAW III. Forums discuss a newer Version 5.1. A notable change has to do with a particular design quirk in the original whereby the on-screen clock ticks by in weeks which are actually months. The update tries to rescale everything to make the scenario calendar match the game engine. I’ve always wondered why it was necessary to fudge the scale in the first place.

That forum also seems to contain some playtesting trial-and-error involved with getting the scenario to run in TOAW IV. As much as that would seem like a great step forward in playability for this scenario, it is not clear that they could get it working. It isn’t included in the installed scenarios for TOAW IV. If problems remain without some version-IV-specific editing, I wouldn’t be surprised. Campaign for South Vietnam tortures strategic-level play out of the engine and there is bound to be some level of reliance on quirks and specifics that throw things for a loop when going to the upgrade.

As a test of all this theory, I did give TOAW IV a try myself and ran into at least one problem. Part of the design of the scenario is that the player can trigger, through the disbanding of dummy units, the deployment of additional U.S. formations to the theater. Once you request deployment, there is a variable (at least, I think it is variable) delay and then the units are placed in a deployment zone in the Ocean. When they arrive on-map, they are only at 50% readiness. The player, therefore, has to make a choice between “rushing” the units into Vietnam at partial readiness or waiting a month and then transporting them at, or near, full proficiency. Neither the delay nor the reduced proficiency are working when I request units in TOAW IV. This could be due to a change in the way something is calculated after the update, or it could be a mismanagement of the game options (which would be my fault, not the scenario’s). At this point I don’t know if it is readily fixable, nor do I know what else might be wonky in the newer version.

I’ll stick with TOAW III.

My hypothetical Operation Starlite and more-or-less the right time and place.

Like Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations (although in an entirely different direction), this is a unique use of the TOAW engine and one that creates a genuinely novel game. Victory is, like other full-war scenarios, determined by the Engine Event Variable (EEV), but not directly. Victory is governed simply by the victory points as computed by TOAW, although the EEV has a huge role in the course of the game. Management of that variable, furthermore, is simpler than in Vietnam 1965-1968. Changes are driven mostly by what Vietnam 1965-1975 called “commitment”. So requesting additional units and requesting them rapidly will drive up the EEV. Conversely, sending the boys back home (if you will) will bring it back down.

Playing against the management of commitment (via the EEV) are the victory points. Traditional objective hexes, of course, provide victory point awards as do combat results. Thrown into the mix, however, are transient victory points awarded for “pacification.” This variable award is based on communist occupation of provinces. Effectively this requires the U.S. player to not only hold the cities but also actively seek out enemy units concealed in the rural areas. Finally, the losses also get some special treatment. Losses in battle count against the suffering side but the U.S. is much more sensitive to losses in the field. So U.S. losses hit the victory point accumulation disproportionately but they also contribute to the commitment (EEV) level.

The various simplifications seemed to have improved gameplay over the similarly-designed Vietnam 1965-1968. The method of requesting additional forces not only gives the U.S. player complete control, but it is easier to wrap your head around than the Vietnam 1965-1968 method, which uses the Theater Options to manage forces. The tedium of “running the roads” that I complained about before is mitigated by the month-long turns. Movement allowances are big enough to allow U.S. units extensive movement within a single turn. The same movement/turn length also fixes the supply problem. When it only takes a single turn to get into your operational area and start fighting, you don’t need to plan 4-5 turns ahead to keep units resupplied. The unit count also seems more reasonable, which helps reduce excessive counter pushing. Finally that month-long-turn scale again helps to mitigate the issue with turns timing-out before you complete a multi-phase battle. More often than not, you can count on begin able to spread your combats out over multiple rounds according to your plans, not some capricious internal variable.

So, in a number of ways, this seems to get things right where other scenarios struggled. I wondered before if the TOAW engine was capable of handling a Vietnam-style war but, so far*, it seems to be doing well. In particular, the use of the Event Variable to drive events (namely, the point at which the U.S. will be forced to withdraw due to political considerations) is a much better use of the TOAW infrastructure than Vietnam 1965-1968‘s EEV-driven victory conditions.

Since I’m pausing here to keep all my historical what-ifs in sync, I’ll repeat something that is mentioned in the scenario document for Campaign for South Vietnam. The author points out that this game will almost certainly not re-enact the major battles of the Vietnam War. In order to do that, both players would have to be attempting to recreate the historical conditions. In a single-player game, the programmed opponent is going to do things that absolutely will deviate from history and I, as the opponent, will have to react accordingly.

That said, this game really has a feeling that it is guided by meaningful decisions at the strategic level which then are implemented operationally. The operational tail isn’t wagging the strategic dog, as Vietnam 1965-1968 felt like. Neither is this, like Boonie Rats, simply a “grand-operational” game where the units come into and leave South Vietnam on the predetermined historical schedule, all but blind to what is actually happening on your game board. While I don’t expect my game to actually track historical outcomes, I get the sense that attempting to win the strategic game will force me into making similar decisions as happened 50 years ago.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, finishing of the Battle of Ia Drang with LZ Albany scenarios.

*As with Boonie Rats 1965-1972, I stopped my strategic-level play at roughly the same spot I’ve halted with my other games and reading; early 1966.

What Hump?

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Vietnam Combat Operations, Young Frankenstein

I’m a rather brilliant surgeon.

This is the twenty-third 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.

In Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Operation Hump takes place over two turns. Typical of the smaller operations in this scenario, once I found the enemy (predictably, I figure in retrospect, located at Hill 65) there was only one other turn of combat. The “battle” ended with the VC unit being removed from play through the TOAW event system.

Fire from the skies. I’ve isolated the enemy at Hill 65 and I’m fixin’ to rip him a new one.

Playing at this operation back-to-back with the Ia Drang valley lead-up, another strength of this scenario series is demonstrated. Any number of the battles in Vietnam are familiar to me through my reading or (as likely as not) other games, but I don’t have it integrated into a comprehensive picture. This scenario does that for me. It helps place battles in their chronological order and their proper scale (both time and distance). This allows me to get a better sense of how two different battles in different parts of the country might compare, contrast, and relate.

In the case of this operation, it puts into perspective a Squad Battles: Tour of Duty scenario that would otherwise be, pretty much, without any anchoring reference.

Tour of Duty has a fight from the greater Operation Hump battle which, at least if you go by the introduction to the scenario, is used in that game to introduce American participation in the Vietnam War. It is, date wise, the first Tour of Duty scenario between U.S. forces and the North Vietnamese Army, although only by a matter of a couple of days.

I encounter the enemy with what I presume is the head of my column. Casualties come fast and furious.

The battle, actually, could be one of many, many patrol/ambush situations throughout the Vietnam War. The player starts off with what looks like a pair of companies moving along a jungle trail. Not that they are really moving; the scenario begins with the Americans already located at the scenario objectives. I only know this is Operation Hump because of the scenario description. Neither the units or the terrain have any unique features that might otherwise place them historically.

I contrast with the Steel Panthers scenarios. Where as Steel Panthers tends to have big scenarios that try to capture as much of the interesting parts of the the battle as possible, Squad Battles tends to have very small and tight focus. Part of this may be the Steel Panthers is drawing from a user-made library and hobby scenario builders have a habit of going big when they model a favorite battle. Whatever the cause, the fact is that Squad Battles scenarios tend to be much more limited than Steel Panthers, despite the scale between the two being very similar.

Through the fog of war, I make a decision. It looks like the enemy is attacking from the north, so I’m throwing everything I’ve got in that direction.

This scenario is all about the enemy’s hidden movement. The uniform coverage of jungle in the battle area means that the enemy can only be spotted when they are adjacent to one of your own units. You don’t have the mobility to do much in the way of scouting, so your job is to anticipate where the enemy are going to materialize and then react or not as necessary (or possible).

While I may well have played this scenario before I had no memory of how it went. So I’m going into the setup cold and, I think, that’s how it must be. The initial contact comes (see first screenshot) down and to the left of my column (WSW, if you assume the map oriented with North being up) and, combined with the assumption that this is “forward” in terms of my column facing, I begin to try to deploy in line facing where I think the enemy is. As I move, I being to encounter more enemy all along my column, but always to the “north” of the trail. In the second screenshot, I’ve made the decision to engage the enemy forward of the objectives, assuming that I’ve come in contact with the bulk of who is out there.

The end result was a minor victory. Despite the devastation of a couple of my squads and the loss of one of my company commanders (a captain) to friendly mortar fire, my kill ratio was high enough to call this one a win. At the end, the game does a complete reveal of all hidden units. Surprisingly, the were two intact enemy companies with good morale located on the final map and, I might add, not quite where I thought the remaining enemy would be. I’ll not show a screenshot of that position because it will ruin this scenario for anyone who is intending to play it. Also, without many replays through the scenario (which I don’t intend to do), I’m not sure if the enemy positions are more-or-less determined or whether some random AI factors put them where the ended up.

Even so, this clearly highlights the two criticisms I have of Squad Battles scenarios in general. First, replayability is low because the tight scope of the scenario often allows only for a single solution. Second, the AI is weak relative to the task its required to perform, standing out in this regard even among its peers. I’ll grant that the non-cheating AI couldn’t have known I’d left all three victory point locations relatively open. Given that it had two uncommitted companies left over at the end of the game, it seems that it should have at least been making a play for those points.

The problem may be in the requirements. The HPS line of games seems to cater, first and foremost, to players playing each other rather than solo play. This requires that scenarios generally be equally winnable by both sides. Gamers in general, but particularly wargamers, also don’t like AIs that cheat – giving the non-player side an advantage by knowing things that a human playing that side couldn’t possibly know. In some ways it seems like, given the impossibility of making an effective computer opponent under these circumstances, the developers may have given up even trying.

Contrast that to the last game I played, where virtually no fancy footwork is required due to the design of the game purely as a single-player experience. But in that case, there is a distinct lack of connection to reality and no battles are “simulated.” Is there a way to have our cake and eat it to?

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, about a base-defense scenario to the north of Saigon.