Leyte 1944, Scenario Forty-Six: Renewed Assault

The last scenario in the Leyte book and a tough one! The Americans and Japanese have about the same size of forces with the Americans having more off-board artillery but three victory levels to try and achieve or not. All the victory objectives are on map 83 but both sides will need map 82 to maneuver on and setup blocking forces. This time the dice clearly favored the Japanese and about half way through the scenario I got desperate as the Americans and started making assault combats which favor the Japanese. I only had two engineer units but clearly needed a FLM Engineer or two to avoid the fire-first which I had none. With seven turns left, the picture was clear, the Americans were too disorganized and in various state of morale to achieve any victory conditions, they had even lost more steps than the Japanese. I threw in the towel at this point, giving the Japanese a Major Victory.

Just like in historical life, the Americans couldn’t break the Japanese until the next day. In hindsight, I went after too many objectives at once as the American player and had my forces split into three groups with only the right flank having a little success. The middle took two towns but was beaten down in continued assault combat. The left flank was total failure. It is not like the Japanese were in great shape but better than the Americans at this point and the Americans still had half the map to clear and that was going to happen, as many of the northern Japanese units had even seen combat yet.