The Hawk

The Hawk

Tuesday saw a few more faces showing up here. I don’t know them, but I know I haven’t seen them yet. After hovering around a bit I found a guy waiting on a game and introduced myself. Mike Faulkner is a fellow from Florida who now lives in Cleveland. I’ve seen him here for the past few days, and he seemed to be a pleasant guy. Turns out I was right.

He had a list of scenarios he wanted to play, and one jumped out at me. HS-BRT1 The Hawk, from Blood Reef Tarawa. Tarawa is a small atoll in the Pacific, scene of a violent confrontation between the US Marines and the Japanese in 1943. A lot of medals were handed out at Tarawa, many of them posthumously. I asked if he was interested and he readily agreed, allowing me to take the Marines.

The Marines are assaulting a collection of four pillboxes, attacking with 6.5 squads, 4 demolition charges, a flame thrower and a 10-3 heroic leader. The leader represent a real life Lieutenant Hawkins. I don’t have the historical in front of me, but it roughly goes as follows:

Hawkins directed the assault against the Japanese. Wounded several times, he refused medical treatment and appropriated more demolition charges. When asked, he said he was going off to kill more Japanese. He led the assault effectively until being cut down by a machine gun. Despite his wounds, he lived another four hours and continued to direct the battle until the pillboxes were destroyed. He died on the island that night.

The Japanese are defending with seven squads, a Heavy Machine Gun, two Medium Machine Guns, and a 70 MM Gun, along with the four pillboxes and two fortified locations.

The scenario opened with me dividing my forces to advance from both sides on a ring of mutually supporting pillboxes. I had two decent avenues of approach into the fortified locations, and out of the covered arcs of the pillboxes. I worried about splitting my troops, but the terrain is so tight, they couldn’t have effectively fought without being too crowded. It turned out not to really hurt me, but it was a worry.

I managed to scoot up close to the Japanese early, and the threat of my large firepower kept him hiding in concealment. I gave the heroic leader a demolition charge (DC) and got ready to try to place it on a large collection of Japanese in a fortified building adjacent to me. First, I managed to place a White Phosporous grenade on that stack, but it proved to be ineffective (I forgot they get the protection of the building on the morale check). Then to draw some fire, I sent a squad with a DC to try to take out a bunker from outside the covered arc. The Japanese in the fortified building tried to protect them, and managed to pin the squad, preventing them from placing the DC. The heroic leader then jumped out and placed the DC on the stack, sucking up some big shots, but he’s a hero. The DC was placed.

On the other side, using more smoke as cover, I placed a DC on the other fortified building using a 9-1 leader. He dodged some fire and got the job done. When it came time for the DCs to explode, the one placed by the 9-1 went off with snake eyes, resulting in two reduced squads and a wounded leader, along with a dead crew. We even had to check to see if the building caught on fire. Excellent.

The DC placed by the 10-3 then went off, and I rolled boxcars, resulting in a dud. The Bell Curve re-established itself to my sorrow.

The next turn saw the Japanese trying to avoid being shot by the superior American firepower. I fired the flame thrower into one of the bunkers, but a 10 roll resulted in that being the last shot - someone forgot to fuel the tanks. That would hurt me.

I kept my 2.5 squad stack with the 10-3 adjacent to the Japanese, hoping to hit him with a massive volley of fire. As soon as I decided to do that, I began to worry about close combat with the Japanese. I started checking odds and began to sweat. The Japanese are so good at hand to hand combat, it is possible for a single squad to kill everything I had there, and sure enough, Mike knew what to do.

A single squad advanced in, attacking at 1-4 odds, but with one of my squads exhausted and pinned, he only needed a 6 or less on two dice to kill everyone. I need about any roll to kill him, but mutual death would be VERY bad for me. Stupid Todd…stupid. He rolled a 9, which got my heart beating again. I snuffed his guy and thanked the ASL gods for sparing me from my error.

Turns out they were just being cruel. The next turn saw repeat of the DC placement by the 10-3, but this time Mike rolled snakes and inflicted a wound on the heroic leader. He retained rate of fire on the machine gun and hit him again, this time wounding him a second time and killing him outright when I failed a severity check. He followed up by hosing the rest of my troops, which promptly began to fail and die. On the other side, my DC placement went poorly with some terrific dice rolls on his part, resulting in the loss of half my guys in a short time. We did the math and I realized I couldn’t possibly win.

I would have done only a few things differently. Mike agrees that I did little WRONG, if just went poorly on the dice. Not to take anything away from Mike, as he did exactly what he had to do, but luck helps and hurts on both sides.

It’s a great scenario, and I would like to try it again and see how it comes out. Lieutenant Hawkins still died, but this time the job didn’t get done.

Lunch is now over and after posting this, I’m back to the grind. Stay tuned…