Back to the Missenhitti….Part 1

The opening positions. The two Union ironclads gunboats - U.S.S. Carondelet with her distinctive red funnel bands top left and the U.S.S. Essex bottom left - are at anchor with the timber-clad U.S.S.  Lexington at the top of the picture on patrol.

A closer view of the Union ships. The cloth is from Peter Pig from their Hammerin’ Iron range and features hexes that are 4 1/2” between the flat sides. Luckily these models fit in a single hex - the frigates and sloops I have built are slightly larger - averaging around five inches long at the waterline - which explains why I have not used this mat for much in the way of testing for the new rules. Plus the fact it has banks either side of the river!

Wednesday evening saw a further test of the rules for the new book. This time, we went back to the American Civil War. As a reminder, I have completed the specs for the ACW ships along with the ship record charts, so it was a good idea to see how it worked out. I was also keen to see how they compared in action with those in the Portable Ironclads Wargame. Once again, the trusty dynamic duo of Messrs Huband and Fox were in command of the Union and Confederate forces respectively, whilst yours truly was busy with umpiring and general observations etc.

The scenario was set along a stretch of the mighty Missenhitti River - the ‘Great Father of Waters’ - some miles upstream of the small extemporised Confederate naval base of Pratt’s Landing. The action falls between the battle described in Bob Cordery’s book Gridded Naval Wargames and that in my own The Portable Ironclads Wargame. 

This is part one of the after action report, mainly due to only being able to run three game turns in the time allowed but, the grand finale will be fought next Wednesday so consider this to be an appetiser of sorts!

At the start of the action the Union forces consisted of the timber-clad gunboat the U.S.S. Lexington and the two ironclad gunboats the U.S.S. Carondelet and the U.S.S. Essex. These vessels formed part of a task force ordered to sweep the river of any enemy shipping but thus far, no Confederate vessels had been sighted. As was standard practise, half of the ironclads anchored close to the shore for the night whilst the remainder continued to patrol the river. In the meantime, the U.S.S. Lexington acted as a guard ship for the  vessels moored inshore.

Back to the Missenhitti….Part 1

Captain Ambrose Hill of the U.S.S. Lexington was looking forward to anchoring his ship and getting some well deserved rest once the two ironclads he had been guarding had raised steam and resumed their station. It had been a quiet night, with no sign of any enemy activity on the river. The confederates were there though, along both banks with the telltale light of their campfires casting an eerie glow in the night sky. He knew that they had been shadowed and that their presence would have undoubtedly reported to Pratt’s Landing. So far though, nothing had happened. Captain Hill hoped it would remain so. He was to be disappointed.

Captain Noah “Redeye” Fox, officer commanding, C.S.S. Atlanta had quietly slipped his small squadron of three ships - the ironclads C.S.S. Atlanta, C.S.S. Albemarle and the small ram, the C.S.S. Little Rebel - from their moorings in the early hours of the morning, based solely on a fragmentary report arriving from one of the roving cavalry patrols. According to the reports he could potentially be facing anything from three to seven ships, including ironclads. He had carefully weighed up the odds and deduced that four or possibly five ships would be the more likely, of which half or slightly more would be ironclads. Numerically then, the odds were not in his favour but, with the element of surprise in his favour, this alone could negate any numerical advantage the Union may have. He had hoped to have been able to take the C.S.S. Missenhitti with him but she was still being repaired after her recent action against the Union monitor, the U.S.S. Admonisher. Given the paucity of material available to effect her repairs, there were shortages of all kinds of necessary equipment, Captain Fox was no longer convinced that she would even be repaired - broken up for spares would be her more likely fate.

The three Confederate ships, in line abreast, heading upstream to look for the Union squadron. The C.S.S. Atlanta was in the centre with the C.S.S. Little Rebel on her starboard beam and the C.S.S. Albemarle on the port side. 

They had just rounded a gentle bend when the lookout on the Atlanta dropped rather than climbed down the ladder into the pilot house. “Smoke dead ahead, looks like a side-wheeler!”. Captain Fox and his officers immediately peered into the early morning gloom. “There….there she is!” Captain Fox urgently ordered the ship to action stations and increased speed. 

Meanwhile, the C.S.S. Little Rebel, operating off the starboard side of the C.S.S. Atlanta, had spotted the ugly, squat outline of not one, but two Union ironclads seemingly at anchor directly ahead of her. Better than that, neither ship appeared to have steam raised. Her captain ordered maximum speed and to prepare for ramming.

Captain Hill aboard the U.S.S Lexington spotted not one but three plumes of smoke astern of him and so without ceremony ordered the ship to turn to face them at best speed, all the while giving out five honks from the ship’s horn - the signal for danger.

The two Union ironclads heard the warning signal from the Lexington simultaneously but the U.S.S. Carondelet had already deduced that something was amiss as she spied the rapidly approaching Confederate steamer, seemingly on a collision course. Both ships, galvanised into action by the approaching Confederate ships, desperately attempted to raise steam so as to be able to manoeuvre away for the shore and into action. It would be a race against time.

As the Lexington swung about so as to engage the enemy, buying time for the ironclads to join the fray, the U.S.S. Essex, by virtue of her superbly drilled crew, raised anchor and cautiously eased away from the shore, all the while readying her guns and attempting to increase speed. U.S.S. Carondelet however, was about to have rather more pressing problems to contend with.

The C.S.S. Little Rebel, her engine straining to the utmost, bore down at full speed on the hapless U.S.S. Carondelet. Aboard the Union ironclad the scene was of chaos as guns were hastily readied whilst the boiler was hastily and unevenly stoked. Her captain knew what was about to happen and barely had enough time to order “Brace for Impact” when the small Confederate steamer tore into her amidships. The effect was very nearly catastrophic.

Aside from the gaping gash ripped into her starboard side, great gouts of flame gushed from her gunports as the hastily readied powder charges ignited when exposed to the spill from the boiler’s furnace - the ships haphazard efforts to make ready quickly working against her. The fire caught quickly and the luckless ironclad was smothered in patches of flame, soot and smoke. The blazing crackle and screams of the burned and scalded crew added to the hellish scene, but the U.S.S, Carondelet and her captain were made of sterner stuff, as the C.S.S. Little Rebel was about to discover.

The C.S.S. Little Rebel, surging ahead of the rest of the Confederate force, prepares her run against the anchored U.S.S. Carondelet (middle left). The C.S.S. Atlanta, supported by the C.S.S. Albemarle, bears down on the stern of the U.S.S. Lexington.

Another view of the action with the C.S.S. Little Rebel fast approaching the U.S.S. Carondelet.

The battered but unbowed U.S.S. Carondelet successfully defeats the C.S.S. Little Rebel while attempting to stay afloat. She is still burning, but the crew are struggling to contain the flames.

The U.S.S. Essex is successfully underway with the C.S.S. Atlanta heading her way.

Aboard the small Confederate steamer all was not well. Whilst her impact with the Union ship had seriously damaged the enemy vessel she did not get off lightly. Her bows were smashed in, open to the muddy brown waters of the Missenhitti, and as she backed carefully away, she came under heavy fire from the battered U.S.S. Carondelet at point blank range. Shot after shot poured into her riven hull and she was soon in a parlous condition. With water flooding in from the great holes along her side and her smashed bow,  so the proud and gallant steamer settled lower and lower in the river, sinking slowly.

Captain Fox saw all of this and noted that the second Union ironclad was underway whilst the side-wheeler was heading his way. His practised eye could also not help but notice heavy smoke approaching from the West….

To be continued….

Cavalier: Part the first…..

Today saw me taking the easy hour long drive to Tonbridge in Kent to visit Cavalier - the wargames show organised by the Tonbridge Wells Wargames Society. It was a big deal for me in that it is the first show I have been to since 2024, hence this being over two posts.

This post is devoted to the ‘haul’ - in other words what I came away with and why. The second part will be the inevitable photo dump of the games, of which I was delighted to see not one but two naval games, both of which are of direct interest!

There were a a couple of bits I was after specifically but for the most part I planned to see what inspired me enough to part with any cash but certainly before I did so.

These were very much a ‘backfill’ for the library. I have always enjoyed gaming the wars of the late Roman Republic, mainly for the diversity of opponents, and so securing these three titles from the esteemed Dave Lanchester was a great way to start the show!

I have been an occasional member of the Society of Ancients over the years and seeing this hex based game devised by Prof. Phil Sabin was more than my wallet could endure…. His book Lost Battles is an excellent read and has some really good ideas for gaming the great battles of the ancient world. I caught up with Tony from Brigade Models and again, Imperial Skies had been on the radar from a while so I had to, finally, get a copy. Gotta love some VSF aerial action!

Now these two were definitely impulse purchases! Reaction Games are a new firm and the two offerings are a tank based game - for which they have a range of resin tanks available - and a WW2 coastal warfare game, again with resin 3D printed models. The starter set comes with a pair of S boats, a Vosper and a Fairmile B. I purchased some additional ships to round out the set and will certainly be adding some more when I can. These are scaled at 1:500th and I will post a review in due course. 

Finally, I picked up a couple of sprues of the Mantic Epic Sci fi ‘Enforcers’ for a project that has been several years in the planning!

The haul then, was varied but with nothing too outlandish. The Traverse rules are rather like a ‘World of Tanks’ style game which is fine for a quick armoured bash. I have a whole pile of 15mm tanks etc that would be ideal to use with these rules (they are scaled at 15mm) but seeing their resin offerings is certainly very tempting as an alternative.

It was great to indulge in some retail therapy and the mix between what I wanted to get and what I actually got was about even!

Win, win I reckon!

Sino Japanese War 1894/95

 

The latest offering from the indefatigable Mr. Manley. Broadside and Salvo rules, a potted history of the campaign and a complete campaign system as well. Available, along with his other naval rules, from the Wargames Vault under his Long Face Games label. Very highly recommended - despite not being on a grid! Yet….

My knowledge about the above campaign was extremely limited until I started looking at the Russo Japanese War. I had certainly not thought about as a viable gaming option but, with the publication of the above, along with some acquisitions to the library and, probably the biggest surprise, the acquisition of two fleets in 1:1800th resin!

Another title from Mr. Olender - I also have both his volumes on the Russo Japanese War, the Russo Turkish War, the Austro Italian War, The War in the Pacific and shortly to be joined by the Sino French War. They are excellent. Also an Osprey Duel title on the battle of the Yalu River.

A little digging through my library also has some snippets about the war so I reckon I have everything I need to crack on the two forces. 

There are models available from Tumbling Dice in 1:2400th as well as 1:3000th from Navwar. In both cases they are nice models but are quite small. A quick trawl through the net and I decided that 1:1800th might be a better option - both for this and any other pre-dreadnought set ups. I like this scale and was first  introduced to it via Axis and Allies: War at Sea, the collectible WW2 naval game, also used by Warlord in their Victory at Sea range.

The firm I have used are called Three Decks Dockyard and so I ordered both sides for the Battle of Yalu. I will post a fuller review once I have looked at them in detail. They are still quite diminutive but, and this is a really handy point, even allowing for bases they will fit comfortably on the hexes of my new gaming mat. The hexes measure 2” across the flat sides and as the cloth is 6ft by 4ft there would be plenty of ‘sea room’ for manoeuvring. 

The BIG Decision

Work on the book is moving along at a fair old rate of knots! I have decided that the pre-dreadnought era battle that will be included in the book (there will be three battle reports, one for each sub-period) is going to be Yalu River rather than something Russo Japanese War based. Obviously I will need to base and paint the models but this will not be a problem as the numbers involved are quite modest.

So, it looks like I will have plenty to do over the next six months as I will also have to tackle the Great War as well. Luckily painting ships in smaller scales holds no terrors - even for me!

Cruisers from 1865 to 1910

Really chuffed to have gotten a copy of this - it will save me having to trawl through some dozen or so books at once!

I must confess that I remember seeing the above title when it was first published in 2018 and thinking at the time “I must get a copy of that” - but never got around to it. A chance conversation with the redoubtable Mr Fox at the club, in which he mentioned the above, then served as a timely reminder about it being missing from my collection. 

A swift trawl through eBay later, a secondhand but pristine copy arrived this morning! As Samwise Gamgee remarked in the Lord of the Rings “Glory and Trumpets!” 

What. A. Book.

The title says it all and so it is an invaluable resource on the subject as it covers all the world’s navies (at least those that used large cruisers) in a single volume. I have some other titles of Mr Dodsons - the Kaiser’s Battlefleet and the Kaiser’s Cruisers immediately spring to mind - and this volume follows a similar format. There are plans aplenty along with photographs, technical details as well as some very useful design and development background.

The book covers virtually the entire period that my current title does so I am sure to be using this extensively and yes, it will most certainly be featuring in the bibliography!

The Spanish Civil and Chaco Wars

The entire Chaco collection. There is a soon to be published book from Helion on the naval dimension - gunboats and such like - which I will add but other than some figures from Irregular that should be pretty much it.

The back of the box. This is an old school hex and counter game that is largely the same as the original, just a lot better looking!

I flirted with the Chaco war some years ago but never really did much with it. This proved to be a mistake and I blame Compass Games wholeheartedly for making me revisit it!

Many years ago I played an old GDW board game designed by Frank Chadwick and Marc Miller called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Chaco. At the time I only played the game and did little research into the war as a whole. My last dabble in the period was when Irregular Miniatures released their 15mm range which, although modest, had pretty much everything you needed to raise the opposing Bolivian and Paraguayan armies.

For a variety of what seemed like good reasons at the time, I quietly disposed of the whole lot as it had sat on the shelf of shame with little chance of progressing to the tabletop.

To bring this story up to date I noticed some while ago that Compass Games had taken the original game and brought it up to date in respect of the board and counters (it now has a mounted board with larger counters that are far more attractive than the original version) and so when Second Chance Games included it in their catalogue and then their sale, I snapped a copy up!

Naturally this meant that I would need to reacquaint myself with the period and this coincided with a couple of titles heavily discounted on eBay, along with the withering rump of an Amazon gift card. These additional titles were speedily acquired, along with an updated version of Adrian English’s The Green Hell entitled The Chaco War and published by Partizan Press in hardback. So where is this heading? Well the heart part of me would love to raise a couple of representative forces in 15mm, probably with the Portable Wargame in mind. The head however, is saying to exercise restraint. I will have to think about this as I have W-A-Y too many other things to think about, not to mention the small matter of an editorial deadline. We shall see. In any event there may be a short term occasional solution which I will explain at the end of this post.

The Spanish Civil War afloat. Again, another small project idea and like the Chaco War, something that I have looked at previously.

The naval dimension of the Spanish Civil War is something that I have looked at in the past but again, not in a sustained way. It is something I have in mind to revisit and so the inevitable fleshing out the library prior to looking at models has begun with the acquisition of the above. 1:3000th would be the scale of choice for this and mercifully it would need many models to have a representative set up. Again, one for the project list. The trouble is, there comes a point where all the small projects become a huge big project which usually means that things are either parked on the shelf of shame or disposed of!

Try before you buy….

As luck would have it, my old friend Mr. Nick Huband already has table ready forces for both the Chaco and the Spanish Civil War afloat so I reckon I might be bending his esteemed ear for a cheeky game or two in the not too distant future, purely in the interests of research, naturally….

ACW and Imagi-nation Napoleonics

The standard two-decker on the right and my filed version on the left. The plastic is very hard so it took a lot of careful wok to get the hull reduced and more importantly, level!

I was really firing on all cylinders yesterday! In a burst of productivity I was able to finish the ship specs for the American Civil War ships for the new book - a week ahead of schedule. In doing so I made the decision to split the ship specification section into two parts - the first being how to spec any given warship (including a few historical examples, something I did not do in The Portable Ironclads Wargame) and with the second being the pre-generated specs I have been working on. Next up will be the ship charts and once they are ready I reckon a cheeky little ACW naval game may well be in order.

I took delivery this morning of a whole pile of generic 18mm-ish hard plastic Napoleonic types - infantry, cavalry, artillery, a warship and two sizes of building - to add to the pile I picked up from Bob Cordery a few years back along with the ships from Mark Cordone. These are the same figures used in the Worthington Games Napoleon’s War series along with a US game called Viktory II (that is how it spelled for game purposes).

For the moment it is the ships that I am particularly interested in as I have an age of sail itch that is becoming more and more insistent. As mentioned in a previous blog entry the model is a stylised two-decker in full sail but minus a ‘spanker’ - the big sawn-off triangle sail at the rear of the ship. Well, I have a cunning plan to rectify this involving a certain well-known naval rules author and a willing 3D printer!

I was able to fashion a single deck warship by filing the lower hull - the plastic is very hard so it took some work - but am unsure about three-deckers. I will give that some thought.

Some suitably generic buildings - I have a dozen of each size which will give me enough for a couple of small towns/villages. They are easy enough to ‘pimp’ with the addition of walls etc.

The buildings are suitably generic and ‘Monopoly-esque’ and again, in that hard plastic. They will be very useful for a few ideas I have as I wanted something smaller than my old standby ‘Town in a Bag’ wooden buildings.

Horse, foot and guns. They are rather elegant models and again, suitably generic. The infantry are around 18mm tall.

The figures themselves are perfectly usable as they are and certainly for imagi-nations they are ideal, as Mark Cordone with his wonderful armies has shown. Something else to think about then (again!).

Gunboat Diplomacy

S.M.S. Iltis

I have always had a fondness for gunboats. This probably stemmed from the very first naval wargame command way back in the late 1970s during an action fought as part of the famous Madasahatta campaign run by Eric Knowles. My ‘command’ was a pair of German gunboats - Iltis class as I recall - tasked with harbour defence and coastal patrol duties. For this action they spent the entire games circling frantically in the inner basin of the main German naval base whilst under battleship calibre bombardment by the RN blockading force. They survived unscathed and I even managed to score a single hit with a 3.4” gun against one of the RN battleships - a fact of which I was ridiculously pleased with. However, my delight was short lived as Eric announced after the conclusion of the action that the two gunboats were subsequently scuttled by their crews so as to avoid capture….

Anyways, aside from starting my lifelong interest in naval wargames it also gave me the aforementioned fondness for gunboats.

Gunboats. Some very nice Ospreys, the magnificent River Gunboats, Send a Gunboat and Tigris Gunboats - a great account of the gunboat operations along the, you’ve guessed it, the Tigris! Not illustrated but also in the collection is The Phantom Flotilla and Mimi and Tou Tou go forth - both of which cover the Lake Tanganyika expedition in the Great War.

I have accrued a modest library of books on the subject of gunboats with the American Civil War collection alongside. Missing from the above and certainly something I would like to learn more about is the use of gunboats on the great rivers of China - shades of the Sand Pebbles - and there are a few titles around that cover this, albeit a touch on the expensive side.

Gaming gunboats operations is a lot of fun as they tend to be almost skirmish level actions, with skirmish level action levels of details (that is a lot of levels!).  Rules are a no-brainer.

David Manley’s rules Steamer Wars, along with his three expansions (four if you also include my Hexed adaptation of the core rules) covering the Russian Civil War, European operations during the Great War and, by way of something very different, Lake Garda during the war of 1866 - are all excellent and give an already great game extra variety. All of these, along with his other naval related works, are available on Wargames Vault. 

Aside from the gaming aspect of gunboats operations I also really enjoy making the models in my customary simple looking style. It will be no surprise then, when I say that I have a few ideas on the go….