The Solomons Campaign – Turn 1

This past weekend, me and a friend of mine started The Solomons Campaign from ODGW, using GQ3 to resolve tactical combat. I have been on a WW2 naval bend for a little while and decided on 1/6000 scale ships for the sake of space, convenience and cost. I’ve also been craving a campaign of some sort for a while. I tried a foray into board games last year but they just don’t capture my imagination the same way table top wargaming does. I really like the way TSC is set up and plays out, it took us some time to work out the sequence and to fix a few errors but now that we have it figured it I’m looking forward to the rest of the campaign.

We started the campaign with the assumption that the Savo Island occurred and used the historical results.

Date: August, 1942

Weather Forecast : Moderate

The Japanese forces in Rabaul are forced support operations in New Guinea and therefore have fewer naval assets at their disposal to support the Guadalcanal effort. The Americans have no choice but to run a supply mission to support their Marines holding Henderson airfield. 

Both the Americans and Japanese sortie a carrier group but neither side has any luck in finding the other and the carrier exchange is inconclusive.

The Japanese send a powerful bombardment force to suppress Henderson Airfield, the Americans respond in kind with their own bombardment force. The American force is unable to locate the enemy and the Japanese effectively suppress the Cactus airforce. The Americans do, however, successfully get their supply lines to the island to provide some relief to the poor shell shocked Marines.

Due to the diversion of the Rabaul assets the Japanese did not get a chance to supply their troop build-up on Guadalcanal, but they did get the Junyo, Hiryo and Ryujo.

The first turn didn’t see any surface or air action as both sides shored up their positions or were unsuccessful in their attempt to intercept the other side.

A couple of my own comments on the campaign: we were pretty unlucky in our rolls for the carrier on carrier action and for the bombardment intercepts. We both had a thirst for combat and it’s good to see that both of us were fairly aggressive but I think the campaign should provide a higher probability of engagements occurring (but maybe they’re more accurate this way). Because there were no surface engagements we had time to play through half of the Turn II, where another carrier engagement occurred and the first die roll would have ended the battle but in the interest of blowing things up we decided to ignore it and re-roll. The second turn also set up a surface combat that will be interesting to play out.

Since there were no surface actions to speak of here are some pics of my fleets:

IJN Fleet

USN Fleet

US Destroyers

US Heavy Cruisers

Yamato