Edinburgh Wargames
WAR IN THE PACIFIC
A one-way ticket to Ironbottom Sound
My first proper foray into naval wargaming came when I lived in Florida, and I was writing for the Osprey Military Journal. The nice people at GHQ sent me some ship models to review, and after that I was hooked. Until then, the only models I'd seen were the 1/3000 scale ones from Navwar in London. these 1/2400 scale GHQ models simply blew them out of the water. The samples I'd been given were all from the Pacific War, so naturally enough I began collecting and building American and Japanese warships.
Pretty early on I decided to concentrate on the ships which took part in the fighting in "Ironbottom Sound", the patch of water north of Guadalcanal that became a graveyard for several warships of both sides. The big attraction was that these were surface actions, usually fought at night. I felt that made for dramatic tabletop encounters. Then I learned that Guadalcanal was just part of the story - the two rival navies fought several more actions in the waters of the Solomon Islands, as the Americans began pushing up the island chain. This was all good wargaming stuff...
I also decided to avoid carrier battles, which might be fun, but would have been almost impossible to stage, unless I had an awful lot more ships, and I had the time and patience to bother with all those aircraft models. It was much easier just to concentrate on the battles of "Ironbottom Sound.
I mounted the ships on plastic card, and the sea was sculpted from Polyfilla (Tetrion in the States). I left a flat space at the back to write on the ship's name. These warships weren't usually camouflaged, which made the painting fairly easy -I simply used a slightly darker shade of grey for the Japanese. They also tended to have decks covered in a tan-coloured linoleum, which made their ships pretty colourful (or garish even). Even the larger ships with wooden decks tended to use a light yellow colour of wood. By contrast the American ships were fairly dull, with either plain grey decks, or dark blue ones for most of their destroyers.
I also made my own ship cards - these ones are designed for General Quarters (3rd edition)
If I was doing these ships over again I'd add masts - the ones which come on the models are small and fairly fragile. replacing them with brass or steel wire seems like a good idea, and anyway, the extra dimension they give to the model makes it well worth the effort. The other good thing about GHQ is that they often provide lots of spare bits (planes, masts, turrets, cranes etc., which come in useful if a model needs repairing).
Another excellent manufacturer is CinC. Their ships aren't so well detailed as their GHQ counterparts, but it could be argued that this is a good thing, as it makes them a little easier to paint. As they lack the deck clutter of deck cleats and ammunition lockers they have a cleaner look to them. besides, while the CinC models lack the masts provided by GHQ, you can always add your own, or raid your GHQ spare parts for extra bits.
We tried various rules, but in the end we returned to an old favourite - General Quarters (1st edition) - which came out in the late Seventies. They weren't particularly detailed, but they produced an enjoyable game. Amongst the other ones I tried were Command at Sea - a big boxed set of rules produced by Clash of Arms. I pretty quickly decided these were unplayable - you needed acres of charts and tables, and the system was far from intuitive. While these rules are probably great for someone who games nothing else but Second World War naval games, they weren't for me. However, I have to say that the information they provided in their date handbooks were really great, and their book of scenarios included in the Rising Sun version of the game was fantastic- just the thing I needed for the Solomons campaign, including detailed scenarios covering all those later battles fought further up the chain of islands. If you're interested in the period, I suggest you try to get hold of a copy of these scenarios.
More General Quarters (3rd edition) Ship Record Cards - much nicer than the ones provided with the rules. All it takes is a bit of time and effort using Microsoft Word, flags downloaded from on-line, and ship drawings lifted from various reference books such as "Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships, 1922-46".
Then General Quarters (third edition) came out. It turned out to be everything I wanted in a set of naval rules. It was a lot more detailed than the first edition (second edition covered the First World War), but most of this detail was integrated into the playsheets (one for each navy), or in the information kept on the ship cards. The rules look fairly lengthy, but if you ignore the separate sections covering aircraft operations, submarines, campaign rules and optional rules, you're left with a fairly simple set of rules , which are both realistic and highly playable.
One of the strengths of the new edition is that aircraft are manageable, and while I still wouldn't want to refight the carrier battles of the Eastern Solomons or Santa Cruz, I would happily use them for daytime operations - for instance if a Japanese warship damaged in a game couldn't escape to safety up "The Slot" before daybreak, you could then finish off the game with an air attack by the Guadalcanal-based "Cactus Airforce".
I never got round to playing a campaign game based on the Guadalcanal battles, but I've certainly thought about it, and there are several board games that could provide all the mechanisms you'd need. I also discovered that Old Dominion Game Works (link off-site) who publish General Quarters now produce a campaign booklet called The Solomons Campaign, which might be well worth a look.
However, that's a job for someone else. I work on the principle that whenever I embark on a new period I need to abandon an old one. Therefore, when I started collecting models for the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean I decided to abandon the Pacific. My collection has now found a good home in Canada, and the two guys there plan to take over where I left off. with luck they'll also let me know how they get on.
Back to the Mediterranean or the Norwegian Sea
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American Civil War Pre-Dreadnought Coastal Forces Second World War