Leyte 1944, Scenario Twenty-Four: Breakneck Ridge

I found out, there is a reason they called this Breakneck Ridge on the Yamashita Line. After my last game play, I learned how to best setup my Japanese defenses. In this scenario I setup a nice position west of the river on map 100 on the hills overlooking the approach of the Americans with a line of minefields, behind that entrenchments with AT-Guns and Machine gun in them, flanked by caves, which were flanked by a few casemates and dug-in Infantry and a few units forward on map 100 to call in artillery on the Americans as they enter the map, as the Japanese have a fair amount of off board Artillery but the American have more. On map 82 I decided to defend the north-south road in that narrow jungle terrain with Japanese Infantry and one HMG unit and one 20mm gun and one casemate unit to support the Infantry. The units not dug-in on the road were in the adjacent jungle hexes in support.

The Americans also had to attack in two groups with the main attack going against the fortified hills on map 100 and the secondary attack going on map 82 against the jungle north-south road the Japanese blocked. I divided my two American groups according to the Birdseye view of the situation. The Americans got hammed right out of the gate entering the map with a 32 value of off map artillery bombardment and a two on the dice roll for a 2X result. Not a great start! The Americans on map 100 ran into a buzz-saw and Japanese Anti-Tank artillery hammered the American armor even getting a crossfire bonus in one case and before this game was over I would lose three steps of Sherman tanks, two steps of M10 Tank Destroyers and one step of Scott tanks. The Infantry on both maps took huge casualties and were so disorganized morale wise and with losses that I finally gave up on map 100 trying to control the enemy entrenchments and caves as even the Engineer-Flame unit lost a step in the minefields and ran off into the jungle.

So at this point I knew the Japanese at least had a minor victory but maybe I could deny them a major victory by taking the north-south road from them, as they only defended it on map 82 but with a nice force and the battle wasn’t going very well there either but I gave it one more attempt until the Japanese assaulted my best stack of American units achieving a 2x result.

The situation with still 6 turn left was hopeless for the Americans to achieve any of their three objectives and I threw in the towel and conceded the Japanese a major victory. The Americans at this point had lost 22 steps and one Lt. Colonel, 12 steps being Armor and 10 Infantry while the Japanese only lost 11 steps and two leaders and were still sitting pretty. Usually my results are the other way around but the Japanese really did have the ultimate defense setup in this scenario. With that said, this was a really fun scenario to play and I’ll be interested to see how other players do. Very enjoyable scenario to play!