Malayan Emergency

This months game was put on by Chas and featured a sharp little skirmish somewhere in Malaya during the Emergency 1948-1960 and gave us a chance to try out the "Force on Force" skirmish rules prior to our large Summer game where we plan to play a "Black Hawk Down" scenario.

The village, with the Mosque in the centre and the Police Station on the right

The scenario had a village police station threatened by a large gang of Chinese guerrillas who had infiltrated into neighbouring buildings and brought the police force under fire. This was all a ruse to cause the local military force consisting of Royal Marines and Gurkhas to come to the rescue and walk into ambushes planned on likely access routes.

  

The Police Station with the District Commissioner's Land rover outside

 The Police station was well guarded and their fire power had to be respected. In fact the initial exchanges of gunfire definitely went in favour of the Police. 



The centre of town saw heavy fighting

The neighbouring jungle provided plenty of cover for the guerrillas to move their forces and the first success for them came when one of the Marine patrols were surprised by a large force of the enemy. After initially debussing from their transport they quickly remounted but the fire from the Guerrillas on the exposed crew caused the vehicle to quickly reverse back up the road.

The Royal Marines were tasked with coming to the rescue

However the other patrol proved more robust and quickly debussed avoiding several booby traps along their route, including mines. They cleared the first main building and went on to clear the mosque.

The battle started to move towards the cross roads where the guerrillas mounted one last attempt at causing casualties to the police and managed to kill a couple of officers and shoot up a Gurkha patrol coming in over the river.

The British firepower soon got control of the situation and the guerrillas were forced to break off

Caution was the watch word with ambushes a constant threat

Chinese guerrillas in ambush

The learning from the game shows that irregular insurgent teams need to tackle regular troops in the open with as much firepower as they can bring to bear. The best guerrilla option were their snipers whose firepower was on a par with the regular troops.

The rules proved quick to master and should work well for our game next summer. Thank you to Chas for a fun game.

Jon