Thread: After-action Report: Turn 1

Kozure — 2008-11-03T23:19:23+00:00

Excerpt from "The Eagle and the Lion: The Anglo-American War of 1935" by Gordon McNeill, Professor of Canadian Military History at Queen's University:

No one really expected the war, even in those uncertain days of late 1934. After the dust settled on the departure of President Franklin Roosevelt and his replacement by President Johnson, diplomats on both sides of the border expected the usual flurry of diplomatic pouches and couched threats to maintain the peace, however guarded.

Prime Minister Bennett's Imperial Preference policies of the early 1930s had cemented ties with Great Britain and alienated many south of the border with high tariffs and trade restrictions, but Johnson and Bennett shared a similar outlook on dealing with the social unrest that had risen during the Depression. Then US Secretary of War Prescott Bush recalled in his memoirs that in a closed meeting between Johnson's staff and Bennett's cabinet, both men had seemed to get along, even making light of Bennett's nickname of "Iron Heel".

Even Bennett's Conservative cabinet had to recognize the danger signs, however, when repeated US Navy exercises were carried out off the Grand Banks, and then, in late April of 1935, a large "wargame" was scheduled to take place in and around the small village of Champlain. Well before the men and equipment of the 1st Infantry Division and the 26th National Guard Division rolled north into upstate New York, Canada's small and ill-equipped army had begun preparations for action.

Although Bennett had opposed it at first, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was alarmed by the American coup d'etat and moved quickly to mobilize elements of the British 3rd Infantry Division to Canada, where it took up barracks in the Port of Montreal. Although nominally in position by January of 1935, the winter weather and hasty nature of its deployment meant it was not immediately able to mobilize at the outset of hostities.

The Royal 22e Regiment was also deployed from Québec to Montreal to link up with elements of the Royal Canadian Regiment as the main Permanent Force defence for the city. The venerable Black Watch and other regiments of the Non Permanent Active Militia were also mustering in advance of the attack. Despite the build of arms and materiel in the region, most insiders in the Canadian government believed the American war exercises to be the usual sabre-rattling to establish the legitimacy and sovereignty of the post-coup US government.

The period of waiting ended with the alarming and now famous April 27th, 11 PM telephone call of one Genevieve Rouses, longtime resident of Champlain, New York, to her cousin, Maurice-Charles Lalonde, a chief in the Sûreté du Québec. Although Lalonde was initially sceptical, he was eventually convinced by Rouses that "les Americains" were indeed planning to cross the border. By a stroke of luck that would prove fortuitous for the Canadians as a nation but disastrous for the Brigade itself, the entire 10th Infantry Brigade (minus its newly acquired tanks of the Three Rivers Regiment) was already in the field on exercises near Napierville, where it was ordered to rapidly take up hasty defensive positions for a possible dawn attack. Across the south shore, militiamen and local constabulary were roused from sleep by telephone call and frantic knocking, or dragged from the Saturday night dance halls where they had been carousing to take up arms against the invader.

Les Américains viennent !

The lead elements of the US 16th Infantry Regiment brushed aside the border guards without a shot at Champlain at 3:02 AM and advanced rapidly up the roads towards Napierville, hoping to cover the 78km between the border and Montreal before daybreak. Behind them, a massive column of infantry loaded into cramped Fords and Dodges had been told that the Canadian armed forces would likely surrender at first sight of the American division.

The Battle of Napierville, which began just before dawn on April 28th, was brief. With the better part of an entire US division arrayed against them, the Canadian 10th Infantry Brigade was doomed from the start. Driving hard, armoured reconnaissance cars of the 101st Cavalry Regiment nearly drove through the makeshift roadblock that Les Fusiliers de Sherbrooke had thrown up on Rang Saint-André. The firefight that broke out marked the first shots fired of the war, claiming Pte. Robert Chauveau, a rifleman in B Company, Les Fusiliers de Sherbrooke, as its first victim.

With massive armour, artillery and air power brought to bear, the fighting lasted for less than two hours and resulted in the death, wounding or capturing of almost the entire brigade. Despite this, the sacrifice of the 10th Infantry bought much needed time for the defenders of Lower Canada to shore up their defences. Rather than the unopposed occupation they had expected, the invaders now had a real fight on their hands.

The French Village Debacle

At the almost the same time as the opening shots of the Battle of Napierville were being fired, 800 kilometers away the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade under the newly promoted Brigadier General Clifton Cates, one of the actual planners of War Plan Crimson, stormed ashore north and south of French Village - nearly ninety minutes behind schedule at 5:17 local time, more than an hour after first light. Canadian defence planners had identified St. Margaret's Bay as a likely landing point and the small group of towns and villages were garrisoned by the Halifax Rifles and the West Nova Scotia Regiment.

With two landing beachheads at Seabright and Indian Point, the 1PMB conducted a classic two-pronged attack against the entrenched defenders of the harbour immediately, despite the lack of covering darkness. Facing a powerful attack, the defending regiments fought as valiantly as could be expected, then scuttled a number of fishing vessels and transports in Glen Haven Bay and off of Croucher's Point. They then withdrew along prearranged fall-back positions through Tantalion and Hubley. Behind them Cates, had higher than expected casualties despite a well-coordinated attack and well-trained Marines; one of his battalions had been significantly reduced.

Frustrated by the reduction in sealift capacity of the harbour and at the escape of the defenders, Cates consolidated his forces and then began preparations to set off in pursuit just before 4 PM of the same day. As he did so, he was astounded to hear that his supporting Naval force was being recalled. Wireless reports of the attack on Québec had reached Royal Navy units which had been pre-emptively (and secretly) steaming off the coast of Maine, and they had begun shelling military targets and supply transports along the coast. Elements of the Scouting Force which had been earmarked for off-shore bombardment duties, already exhausted by a rapid passage from the Pacific, were recalled to defend the transports sailing north from Boston and Boston itself. The transports unloaded what supplies they had on board and docked for safety in the shelter of the harbour, and a small squadron of destroyers flagged by a single aging battlecruiser was tasked to defend the beachhead.

As Cates watched the better part of Scouting Force - the USS New York, USS Arkansas, their escorting cruisers and destroyers - steam over the horizon, he was recorded by his aide-de-camp as saying "Well, it doesn't look like we'll be eating lobster in Halifax this week, Mike."

A Desperate Withdrawal

Sunday, April 28th is remembered by many Québecois who lived on the south shore as a time of confusion and disbelief. Many civilians discovered that the war had begun after they walked out of their parish churches' morning mass to hear the sounds of distant guns. Fortunately, since it was a Sunday and the area south of Montréal predominantly rural, there was not the usual clogging of refugees and panic that would arise north of Montréal and later around Hamilton and Toronto. Militia reinforcements moved quickly to set up hasty defence points at St. Jean-Sur-Richelieu and Saint-Rémi. Local groups of citizenry, armed more with a sense of outrage than common sense, often grouped together in small groups of twenty to eighty men organized by Great War veterans to try to check the progress of the massive US force. More often than not, pragmatic rural Québeckers simply shut themselves in their small farms and village houses and waited for the whirlwind to pass.

Of special note during this time was the formation of the US 1st Experimental Mechanized Brigade, consisting of sixteen M2A2 light tanks from the 101st Cavalry and three infantry battalions who had been trained in the latest experimental theories of mechanized warfare based on the writings of Heinz Guderian. As an interesting footnote, a group of German officers were attached to the US 1st EMB as military observers, among them Oberstleutnant Walther Warlimont, who would later serve in a similar advisory capacity to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Despite its fearsome heraldry (the charging Rhinoceros brigade patch became a collector's item after the war), the Brigade never saw actual combat, much to the frustration of its commander. It was seen in pre-war exercises to be clumsy and uncoordinated; "less effective than its component elements", one staff observer remarked and never left its reserve position near Napierville after the initial occupation. British war propagandists used smuggled photographs of the twin-turreted M2A2 tanks rolling through shattered village storefronts as evidence of the brutality of American occupation in the weeks following the start of the war, when in fact the majority of the brief American occupation was remarkable for its civility.

It was for this reason that the mechanization of the US Army was so far behind at the start of the Second World War - tanks were seen to be even more useless than they had been thought previously, despite many demonstrations to the contrary by Soviet T-26s and German Kondor Legion panzers in the Spanish Civil War a year later.

Sun set on the first day of the war with Napierville in ruins and the Canadian Army grimly marching or driving to defensive positions which could not possibly hold for more than a few days. US victory in the west seemed certain. Even in its earliest days, however, the sudden departure of the supply line for the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade had already sown the seeds of failure for the eastern campaign.

Canada had not been caught completely unaware; like Laura Secord one-hundred and twenty-two years before, Genevieve Rouses' hurried warning had provided just enough alarm to allow the heroic sacrifice of the 10th in Napierville to buy her Canadian cousins some time; time they desperately needed.

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

gregd — 2007-11-03T03:44:11+00:00

Thanks for all your help!

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

ltmurnau — 2007-11-02T18:05:27+00:00

Oh no, not at all- if you can't trust the designer, who can you trust? B~)

Even though the subject is not that realistic or serious, it's still a functioning game, if that's what you meant. It uses the system I developed for Freikorps, another alt-history game (and will be used in Konarmiya, a prequel to Freikorps that covers the Russo-Polish War - due out soon). Players have a two-front war (Halifax and Montreal are separated by several hundred miles, with lots of choices and climaxed by big urban fights.

To get an idea of how the system works, go to the BGG entries on Freikorps and Konarmiya and read the reviews and after-action reports. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask me.

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

gregd — 2007-11-01T00:49:29+00:00

Is this biased?!!!

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

ltmurnau — 2007-10-31T23:00:42+00:00

Yeah, I'd say it's worth getting!

Thread: Is this game worth getting?

gregd — 2007-10-31T19:51:37+00:00

Please give me your opinion if you've played it!

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PAYDIRT — 2007-01-20T02:51:44+00:00

Fiery Dragon Productions

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Shakar — 2004-05-03T11:02:48+00:00

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Shakar — 2004-05-03T11:02:45+00:00

Game: War Plan Crimson

Thread: After-action Report: Turn 1

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

Thread: Re: Is this game worth getting?

Thread: Is this game worth getting?

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