Mindanao 1945, scenario #11: Two Roads North

I couldn’t decide which scenario to play first from Mindanao and ended up playing the last one. An interesting situation where the main action win be on map 83 but the Japanese have to put some forces on map 100 as well or they will get flanked from their left side and the Americans cannot bunch up entering on map 83 as well, so they enter a larger force on map 100 with both maps seeing action.

The American I&R with jeeps and leaders lead both groups and take their hits from both mines and enemy units, this helped the valuable engineer units following up. The Americans have a nice amount of off board artillery support and air-support to blast their way forward but the Japanese have Naval SNLF reinforcements that just happened to enter the action on the first available roll on turn 7 and there is also a little off board artillery support.

The Americans managed to clear most on map 100 but with the road north on map 83 still clogged with both Army and SNLF troops, it was time to exit at least 20 steps of the north edge of map 100 before it was too late and at least get 2 out of 3 victory objectives.

The American managed a minor victory with the Japanese losing 30 steps and 7 leaders to the American losses of 10 steps and 2 leaders and they got 20 good order steps off the north edge of map 100 but could not clear the road north on map 83. They could have risked it and gone for all three of their objectives with the 20 steps that exited but if they didn’t achieve this, they would have giving the Japanese a minor victory only achieving 1 objective, so at a certain point I panicked and pulled the plug on that idea and went for the minor American victory.

Much to think about on this one, both defensively and offensively. Could have gone either way.