Thursday evening the Corlears Hook Fencibles played a game of the 1880 battle of Tacna, with Chile against Peru and Bolivia. Rick played the Chileans and I the Allies. Warning: we did not have any of the correct figures. 1870 French provided the Chileans (and the sole Allied Gatling battery), 1866 Austrians stood in for Bolivians and our most ragged Confederates served as Peruvians. Mitrailleuses stood in for Gatling guns. If you haven't been deeply offended yet, read on.
I began by making an egregious error. The scenario states that aside from the artillery redoubts, the Allies may deploy anywhere on their ridge. I deployed them as marked on the map. This left most of my infantry on the forward slope and my left flank in air. This would not end well.
The Chileans marched on from the western edge and began forming a grand battery astride the only road. This put them within 18" of the forward rifle pits and artillery redoubts, easy artillery range yet beyond rifle range.
The Chilean Gatling battery was limbered, a tempting target. I fired and silenced it on my defensive fire phase and then hit them hard on my next fire phase, going low on ammo. I should have been firing at the enemy artillery, which began hitting my infantry.
The Chileans massed against my left. I began shifting units on bolster my left.
As the line frayed, the left flank CO Colonel Camacho had to jump into a ditch, twice as it turned out. Since there was no road nearby, the appearance of the ditch was deemed a miracle.
Looks bad, eh? Let's shift to the right flank earlier in the game.
Later the right flank artillery put paid to the Chilean cavalry.
And then the Chilean grand battery started to get the range.
They began to combine artillery barrages with infantry fire. Overhead fire is allowed if the intervening friends aren't too close to firer or target. The front slope of the ridge was a shooting gallery. Cover from the rifle pits didn't do enough to counteract this.
A new line was cobbled together as it became obvious something was wrong with the left flank.
This reminds me of Leonidas' last charge in the old 300 Spartans (not the recent movie with the leather panties).
The Chileans had 2 of the three redoubts they needed for victory. One infantry unit was on the verge of taking the one on my right but a fresh Bolivian unit intervened.
We headed into the last turn. I told Rick only one thing counted. He had one unit that could march into my right center redoubt, which had been cleared by his artillery. He rolled a full move and the fresh unit took the redoubt. The only unit I had that might be able to counterattack was spent, disrupted and down to 2 stands. I threw in the towel. Had we played the rest of the turn there would likely have been some more Allied casualties.
We played this one fairly slowly, 3 hours and 40 minutes. That's about 27 minutes a turn. The game was fun, despite the whipping I took. Allied losses were about 6,500 and most of the artillery, while the Chileans lost 2,500 troops and had severe losses in the Gatling battery, which never got into range.
Rick crowed about owning all of the guano. We made numerous jokes about the miraculous survival of Colonel Camacho. Colonel Pinto had to duck into nearby rifle pits towards the end. It was bad day for dress uniforms.
One mistake made was the scenario rules call for a one column shift left for all artillery due to the soft sand of the Atacama muffling shells. I remembered just before we broke for dinner and forgot by the time we returned. The other mistake about the deployment, well all I can say is I was finishing the bases on my 1866 Austrian jaegers before the game and we played two games of W1815. I'm not so great at multi-tasking. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. There won't be any more Fencibles games this month. We'll have something to report in October, if we keep our powder dry.
finally dips his toe into the world of Aeronef.
