Korean War: Counter-Attack, scenario #48: Guarding the Western Rampart

I believe this is the biggest scenario in Counter-Attack as far as counter numbers, if not, pretty close. This one took me a couple of days of off and on play to complete but was well worth it. The US Marines and ROK Marines have a difficult task of fighting a tough dug-in North Korean 25th Brigade and 78th Independent Regiment and an assortment of support weapons/units, dug-in, entrenched and bunkered in. The US Marines will need to work closely with the ROK Marine counter-part to achieve three or four of their victory condition objectives. They will also have a good support of off-board artillery for the whole scenario and six turns of air-support but the NKPA have fair share of off-board artillery as well. It looks to be a bloody battle!

As I mentioned, this took me a couple of days to play out, so I won’t go into blow by blow battle details, as I really got more involved into playing this scenario then recording a detailed AAR this time around but I used the air support and artillery to weaken enemy entrenchments and bunkers positions and tried to setup engineer and bazooka units when possible to assist. I hardly kept track of my casualties at one point, as they kept going up and on both sides.

The Americans were able to achieve three out of four victory conditions for a minor victory but barley! They cleared only one east-west road, cleared the hills on the west side of the river but were not able to clear two 40 meter hill hexes on the east side of the river and just barely made the 125% casualty comparison if I counted correctly. Without the ROK Marines help and the VT Fuze ammo, it would not of happened, at least not in 26 turns. A lot went on in this scenario, even a Marine Capt. deserted in this one, as the heat of battle was extreme in this scenario. If you have a few days or more to leave this one setup it is a great scenarios to play a few hours and come back to it later in the day, or over a few days just to get a new perspective each time you come back to resume play.