Saipan 2nd Edition, scenario #27: Summit of Mount Tapochau

Learning from some previous scenarios, I did not put the Japanese into one group but two battlegroups, one on or around the hill mass with two 40-meter peaks and village nearby and put entrenchment counters adjacent to each other and supporting each other with more units to feed into them if necessary. I put the second Japanese force on the hill mass with the 80-meter point and hex 0904 with a bit smaller Japanese force but the very difficult terrain made up this. Both sides have some off map artillery but against entrenchments, not enough to do much and the American a bit of air-support.

The Americans have two groups of Marines, the first setup on map 83 and the second come on with a variable dice roll of 5 or 6. Mine didn’t come on for a whole 8 turns. The Marines decided to move and attack right away with their on-map battlegroup, against the Japanese entrenchments and paid a heavy price in both their approaches to that objective and their very poor assault combats and kept feeding units into these meat grinders. The Marines have three objectives, control both entrenchments. Control hex 0904 on the far away 80-meter hex and have a two to one advantage in step losses but as these assaults were going the Japanese way and I doubted the Marines could achieve the casualty objective.

The First group of Marines got maul to my surprise and needed the help of the slow arriving 2nd Battalion reinforcements which also got maul a bit before the combine two Battalions finally conquered the two entrenchments but now had to regroup and recover enough demoralized & disrupt unit to go after the bigger hill and the time was ticking away, even with 32 turns. The remnant of the first defeat Japanese group retreated to reinforce the fresh units on the bigger hill. The Marines made a big effort for Hill mass 80-meter and hex 0904 but fell short. I think they would have needed another 3-5 turns to maybe achieve this but as it stood at the end of the scenario, they had only achieved one victory condition, the two entrenchments. They in fact did not have a two to one advantage in step losses but actually lost more the then the Japanese, losing 20 steps and 3 leaders to the Japanese losses of 17 steps and 5 leaders. Hex 0904 was this in Japanese control for a minor Japanese victory.