Tarawa Game

I scanned in a few old photographs of a wargame I played with some of my friends. This is the USMC raid on Tarawa in WWII. I read an article that had detailed maps and information on all the troops from both sides and we figured we had all the stuff we needed to play it as a game. They sent in Marine Raiders from two submarines. They went in by rubber raft, but they had trouble with the outboard motors and the reefs. The reef line is shown here by the little yellow string. Marines had to make a saving roll to get over the reef. Our Marines landed after taking several drowning casualties and then killed all but one or two of the Japanese on the island. Here you can see the Japanese reinforcements coming to the island in a landing craft. Coca-Cola is the wargamers choice of beverage at my house.

The B-17 represents a crashed aircraft that was in the lagoon. We had one Japanese sniper under the Airfix Bamboo House who sold his life dearly for the Emperor. He must have killed at least five Marines in the game. As in real life, the Japanese air support arrived and made several attacks on the ground. The Marines withdrew after having destroyed all the ground installations of consequence. As in real life a few of the Marines were left behind because they could not get to the rendezvous in time. They were killed by the Japanese in real life and in the game. We used Zulus! for the island natives as my collection of South Seas Islanders consists of Zulus. The terrain is Geo Hex with cake decoration palm trees for most of the trees, with a bit of lichen tossed in for scrub brush.

The roads were brown roofing shingles. Durable and cheap, cut them to shape and you are done. The aircraft are on wire coat hangers glued into wooden 2x4 blocks. We used a heavily modified Angriff! system using individually based troops firing individually. You can see the large poster we made for one of the firing charts. When using rules that require you to check charts over an over again, we found it helpful to make them into wall hangings and so we did not need to shuffle all that paper, and I can read them without my glasses. I made my own craters and cast them in resin for the artillery.