For us wargamers, the "War of the Triple Alliance", or "Great Paraguayan War" if you prefer, is notable for generating the largest battle ever fought in South America: Tuyuti, 24 May 1866. At around 60,000 combatants all told, this is not a big battle by BBB standards. Still it is big and bloody enough to deserve our attention. Konstantinos Travlos had drafted a BBB scenario for it, so this week we decided to give it a go.
A photo-report is in Flickr and can be found via my blog:
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As so often in the late nineteenth century, the battle is an interesting one to fight, not just for its historical significance or its exotic Latin American setting, but because it confronts asymmetric armies. The Allies are mostly average line troops, averagely trained and motivated, with modern rifled weapons. The Paraguayans are almost entirely equipped with older smoothbore muskets and cannon, but are ferociously determined fighters. Thus the Allies are better in a firefight, but the Paraguayans have the edge if they can get to grips.
The situation is that Lopez was trying to launch a surprise dawn attack. Unfortunately for him, hacking and squelching through scrub and swamps in the dark slowed his separate columns down and made it impossible to coordinate them. Thus by the time they emerged from the difficult terrain, the Allies were mostly alerted and ready for them. Historically the Paraguayans did manage to close with the Allies in a number of places, and even got in among their camps, but suffered so many losses in doing so that they were eventually driven back and suffered a bloody defeat.
That's pretty much how our game went. The Paraguayan left column got stuck in first – or its cavalry did, as the only thing its infantry got stuck into was a swamp which they never emerged from all game. The cavalry drove my Argentinians back almost to our camp, but were then shot down in droves and receded. Then the right column came out of the scrub to fight the Brazilians. Here too they closed, caused some alarms and gained some ground, but died in heaps and were forced back into the woods. Only in the centre, where the small Uruguayan vanguard was left relatively unsupported while the flank attacks were being repelled, did the Paraguayans taste real success when they stormed the artillery redoubt. But by this time Lopez was running out of troops, while the Allies were relatively lightly scathed, so the Paraguayan players conceded the game.
This was a good entertaining game – albeit a bit stressful for our Paraguayan players, who spent most of the game taking the punishment and not much dishing it out. We had some post-battle thoughts about how to tweak it a bit and we'll be sending feedback to Konstantinos shortly. Hopefully a polished final version will be publicly available soon, and we can play it again next year to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle.
Subject to Konstantinos's permission, probably the full scenario will be posted in the BBB Yahoo group files in due course.
Chris
Bloody Big BATTLES!
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