Jijiga has fallen!

Phil G and Richard P came over yesterday and we played out a TacWW3 game based on Bruce Rea-Taylor's scenario The Battle for Jijiga - the WSLF versus the Derg. 

The rules were TacWWII modified by means of stats for post-WWII units such as T-54 tanks and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, and by adding some draft rules for ATGWs and shoulder-launched SAMs.

In general the changes were pretty light-touch; I don't want to move away from the simplicity of the underlying system. 

The game saw Phil's Ethiopian infantry of the Black Banner Regiment closing on on the Somali-rebel-held town as Cuban "volunteers" in T-55 tanks rushed to support their attack. 

Richard's Western Somali Liberation Front forces were backed up by "volunteers" of their own in the form of a company of T-54s that looked remarkably like those used by the Somali Army.

The scenario is somewhat peculiar in that the actual Ethiopian forces can begin right up close to the line of contact with the WSLF defenders of Jijiga whereas the Cuban armoured battalion arrives from the edge of the table a good (scale) 2km away.

Richard had deployed his WSLF armoured company (two platoons of T-34/85 and a BTR-152 mechanised platoon) on the right in a hedge-lined field. They drove off some Derg infantry but then came under fire from the Cuban T-55s and eventually by Sagger fire from the BMP-1s. This gave us our chance to try out my draft ATGW rules.

Phil put the BMPs into Defence Mode and then declared that he was firing on the T-34s. The WSLF tanks made a Tac roll to see if they detected the incoming missiles. They succeeded by one. This meant that they would automatically evade.

An evade may or may not (at the owning player's discretion) actually involve the model being moved. In this case Richard chose to move the tanks because doing so would put them out of line-of-sight and safe from the in-coming missiles.

Our conclusion was the rules appeared to work OK at first testing with the following tweaks:

• The firer declares which company he is firing at and can target any element of the company he can see when the missiles impact, and
• ATGW fire must be declared first in any given Fire Phase (so as to allow units eligible to direct fire in this Fire Phase to do so at the ATGW firer if they make the appropriate Tac roll).

With the T-34s cleared out of their initial defensive position (shortly afterwards they'd rout after taking casualties) the Ethiopians were able to move forward towards Jijiga.

Time was moving on and I wanted to give Phil a chance to try out the air support rules. I made up my mind that if he didn't roll a 10 to call in his airstrike this turn, I'd declare that it was going in anyway. As it happened of course he did roll a 10!

Bruce Rea-Taylor's original scenario calls for a flight of Su-17s with rocket pods to make a series of passes over the table. Looking online I could see no indication that the Ethiopian Air Force ever had Su-17s so I gave Phil a flight of F-86 Sabres instead.

I treated the F-86 as a Good Fighter in TacWWII terms. This meant that its fixed weapons (strafing with guns) are more effective than its dropped ordnance (bombs or presumably rockets) so we planned to use the Fixed Ordnance factors for both of the two passes the F-86 flight was allowed to make. I say "planned to" because in fact Richard, taking advantage of a test-rule +1 modifier when firing from the rear arc of a jet with an early SAM, managed to shoot down the Sabres after their first pass.

Shortly after the air strike, the Somali T-54 company fled as a result of a fatally bad morale roll and Richard decided that the WSLF would pull out of Jijiga. 

In general we thought the Cold War tweaks worked well but we need to do a battle that involves more ATGW combat to properly test the rules. Perhaps the Israeli counterattacks in Sinai on the second day of the Yom Kippur War would be a way to go, although Phil's keen to try some of the early ATGW use in Vietnam.