Aint gonna hurt nobody!

[Greybeard]

I've on'y had one expereince playing against a Japanese human opponent (H2H). Unfortunately we had to bag the game due to personal problems on my part last year. He was gracious enough to just let the game go.

My opponent did purchase a horde of armor.. much more than I had expected.. The single company of Shermans backed by a platoon of 57mm AT guns and 2 platoons of Stuarts had quite a mess on their hands for some time.. Since the terrain was close, I purchased mainly USMC rifle squads with Garrands and BAR's.. supported by a few 50cal MG's. DUKW's were my troop transport of choice. The map was not random, but a map that was extracted from one of the Japanese scenarios with the game that took place in the Buna area of New Guinea. Marshlands and water were prevalent alnog the North/NW, and some relatively open areas to the south. A river ran from the marshes to the SW to the south map edge. My opponent staged the armored attack in the south.

Anyway - on of my SBD attacks revealed an horde of Japanese Armor that would have made any Russian commander envious.. so I rounded up my Shermans and hoped for the best..

I was surpised at the performance of the M4's.. in this particular instance they acted the quivalent of Tigers vs T-34/76. I lost a couple to flanking fire.. but by and large each Sherman ran up a number of kills and were almost impervious to Japanese tank fire. The AT guns ended up only needed to pick off damaged tanks that it wasn't worth using a 75mm AP round against. The Stuarts fell easily to 47mm tank fire, so I pulled them out to support the troops where the multiple machine guns were very useful.

In the man-to-man arena.. the USMC Rifle squads seemd to have plenty of fire power to keep IJN/IJA troops at bay..eventually causing enough supression to KIA them. The presence of 60mm Mortars helped hugely to keep the spotted Japanese troops seriously supressed most of the time..

-Greybeard