Disclosure, I am the Designer and feel all my scenarios fall into the range of 4-5, 90-100% or I wouldn’t have created them, so take my ratings with a grain of salt! The only reason any are a 4, is because they are more difficult to make from design to development.

Saipan, scenario seven: Throw Them into the Sea!

Kind of a fun smaller version of scenario 10, the Japanese must control some beachheads and the Americans must eliminate Japanese steps, so pretty straight forward and the scenario begins in the night. The Marines don’t have any on board artillery support yet and must reply on the Navy but no problem with the Battleship California and other supporting ships off the coast.

The Japanese enter on map 82 in three locations and group into three attack locations on map 80, just outside of the Americans view. This took 10 turns just to position all the Japanese Army & SNLF units, using up a lot of valuable night-time hours. But with the terrain I picked three major attack locations which in hind-sight might not have been the correct offense for this scenario, as true it kept the Marines spread out but left little to reinforce assault hexes or to flank areas if the Marines had to pull units out of the lines to reinforce assault hexes but I went with it. I even crossed the swamp hexes with my Japanese Type 2 KA-MI amphibious tank just to make room on the main road and to finally use the swamp hex and Japanese Amphibious tank for something. The Japanese split off on the three main roads/trails on map 80 and hit the Marines lines just before sun-rise.

As the direct-fire followed by bombardment fire from a battleship blew apart one of the Japanese offenses right away and the Marines not setup as dug-in were in town hexes. The Japanese managed to assault a couple of town hexes after an exchange of Anti-Tank fire between a group of Type 95’s, & Type 97’s vs. a M3/75mm Halftrack with one step of each being lost, creating a wreck in one of the town hexes. The Sherman tanks were fighting farther north against some other Japanese armor and the LVT (A)-1’s were filling gaps or reinforcing Marine Infantry assault hexes. The Daylight really hurt the Japanese not committed to battle yet, as they got blasted once they were in the line of sight! The Japanese had lost 34 steps with most of the rest demoralized or committed to assaults in half step strength when on pulled the plug on the scenarios about turn 27 of a 32 turn scenario, as the American won and the Japanese were too weak to fulfill their victory conditions. I suppose I could have pulled together one more attempt but by then the Americans could have reacted by shifting their own lines, so it didn’t seem worth it. The Americans did lose 9 steps but that matter little in this scenario.

Next time I will attack in two places as the Japanese and leave one large army section in reserve to exploit success or flank Marine positions, as they shift their lines. The good thing about arm-chairing PG battles, is that you always live another day to try again. Fun stuff!