"Jailbreak!" .. preamble and setup..

" Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See me and the boys we don't like it
So were getting up and going down".

"Jailbreak" Thin Lizzy

Preamble..

As the sun rose over a sleepy Cedar Gulch every inhabitant of the (normally) sleepy town knew that it was going to be a hot one - not only because there wasn't a cloud in the sky, but also because today there was going to be a hanging..

Bart Johnson had never had much going for him, and when he'd been caught red handed following a shootout during a failed bank robbery, he'd also been seen to gun down an innocent civilian who was passing the bank as Bart and the rest of the gang tried to escape. 

It was a sure fire bet that the Circuit Judge wasn't going to spend too much time pondering the niceties of the law while deliberating the sentence. Bart could shout to the Heavens all he wanted that "it was an accident", and he "hadn't meant to to kill him, just wing him!", but Bart was going to hang.

.. but it wasn't quite as clear cut as the members of the law would have liked ..

First, the civilian was not quite as 'innocent' as everyone had believed. He was actually one Seth Harkmann, second in command and a senior member of the notorious Jones Gang. Fresh shaven and redolent of Bay Rum following  a visit to the barbers, Seth had been on his way to "Lily's Place" (TM) and with his mind fully occupied never even had time to reach for his iron before meeting his untimely demise. His boys though were far from happy, and a hanging wasn't going to be enough, they wanted a more painful revenge..

Second, the rest of Barts gang were also not happy, in their eyes the Judge was guilty of a huge calumny (if they could even spell it, never mind understand what it meant) in sentencing Bart to hang - it had been an accident, and rightly should have led to jail time rather than a neck stretching session..

So it was that on the morning of the hanging a number of additional people were on outskirts of Cedar Gulch - all of them armed with well polished and heavily used guns..  'the boys we don't like it', indeed 😏

Setup..

Cedar Gulch - Jones Gang bottom right, the Rescuers top left

• Rules will be "Ruthless" - see the Project Page for links to the basic rules and my solo amendments
• Bart (#2) is held in the jail under the watchful eye of the Sherriff, who will also be doing the duty of hang man when the time comes. The Sherriff's sole mission is to protect Bart from either death or a rescue.
• Bart's rescuers comprise two gang members - Andy* (#3) and Charlie* (#4) - their sole mission is to rescue Bart from the Sherriff's office, and then leg it, preferably alive and unwounded
• The Jones Gang comprises three members - Dave (#6), Eddie (#7) and Frank (#8) - their sole mission is to grab Bart - if they can't do that then a painful death will also do, but not not at any personal cost to them as he's going to hang anyway..
• While the rest of the population are largely unarmed and unwilling to take part in any gun play, there are two who are armed, and are "ready" - these are Gus (#5) and Hank (#1), who are in the Assay Office, and the first floor of the Hotel respectively.. their sole mission is to aid the Sherriff until it's time for Bart to swing, but as moderately unskilled gun men, and civilians, they will not do anything that puts themselves in harms way.
• Bart is (clearly) unarmed - it will take one complete move inside the Sherriff's office/Jail for his rescuers to free him on 6+ on 2D6, and two actions to arm him (Andy and Charlie have bought him a replacement rig comprising belt, ammunition and two six shooters).
• Horses for both gangs are just off table.
• There is nothing specific in the rules for characters armed with twin six guns, so I'm going to say they can fire both but that's an action for each, and clearly if they are armed with two guns they can't fan fire before putting one of them away..

Orders of Battle.. (or rather, The Dramatis Personae 😏)

Character traits were either diced for or decided by me based on the role the character is playing..  just a reminder, the toughness value is between 1 and 10 and the lower the number, the tougher the character..

* ABC, DEF and GH get it? 😀

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Go on, you know you want to.. ✌

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 Stay tuned for the game report, but in the meanwhile, "laters", as the young people are want to say...

"Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar" by Max Hastings.. a review..

One of the books I read on holiday (seven in two weeks - not difficult to see what I was mostly doing!) but without a doubt one of the best of that crop..

Max Hastings is 79 now, and getting on, but he continues to write the kind of 'ordinary' people focussed military history that I love.. as he says himself at the start of the book..  "All my books aspire to tell ‘people’ stories, because these are what history is about. This one is especially so".

This book focusses then on the then nascent Parachute Division's first major operation of WW2, an air assault on the north coast of France to capture a German radar installation known as "Würzburg", but it does it by describing all the major participants and personalities involved in the planning, preparation and the actual assault, as this was one of the first major combined operations actions where all three main services were involved....

In February 1942 RAF intelligence had been baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of occupied Europe, which they codenamed Würzburg (and in my mind I kept misreading that as Wurlitzer 😁). 

The eminent (and stupidly clever!) scientist Dr RV (Reg) Jones proposed an assault in order to capture key components and as the one at Bruneval in Normandy was the nearest, that was the one that was chosen.  

Given that period of the war, with little or no British victories, with Britain and her Commonwealth standing alone against a Germany that had already occupied all of Western Europe and just completed the successful invasion of Norway, not surprisingly Winston Churchill enthused about the idea and made Lord Louis Mountbatten the chief of Combined Operations with a brief to do exactly that.

Combined Operations seems to have been a bit of a circus as Mountbatten, an ego centric if there ever was one*, bought in his cronies to run the operation some of whom were "interesting" to say the least, but out of it came the basic plan of a company of the newly-formed Airborne Forces under the command of John Frost (yes, him of Arnhem fame) dropped on the target by the RAF from (grudgingly given) converted Whitely bombers (as they had no dedicated transport aircraft at that time - the Dakota was a long way down the line). Once the raiding party had suppressed any defence, they were then to dismantle key components of the radar, and rescue would be by Royal Navy landing craft from the cove at the bottom of the cliff the radar was mounted on.

Following an astonishing recon of the site by RAF spotter plane and also the selfless and brave actions of the French Resistance, the raid eventually took place on the night of 27/28 February 1942 and not surprisingly was far from being as easy as all the planners were sure it was going to be. In heavy snow, 120 men landed (most of them paratroopers but they also brought with them dedicated engineering resource in order to identify the radar parts required), but some of whom were mis dropped almost two miles from their objective. 

"Squadron Leader Percy Pickard, Commanding Officer of No. 51 Squadron RAF [hugely experienced, but his plane was one of those that dropped its load of para's off target], inspects a captured German helmet with parachute troops after the Bruneval raid, 28 February 1942. On the night of 27/28 February Pickard's squadron of Whitleys dropped 'C' Company, 2nd Parachute Battalion (commanded by Major J D Frost) near a German Wurzburg radar site at Bruneval near Le Havre in northern France - its objective to seize components of the radar and then evacuate them by sea". Picture courtesy IWM

The Para's nonetheless launched the assault with the troops they had, against an increasingly strengthening German defence, but dismantled the German radar, and after three hours in France eventually escaped in the nick of time by landing-craft across the Channel (in a Force 5 storm) to Portsmouth. All their radio's were lost in the drops and it was only by almost the purest chance that the Para's managed to signal the Naval forces that they were ready to be evacuated - and then only as German lorried and mechanised reinforcements could be seen coming down the coastal road!

In the end then, despite the obvious flaws and stupidities in planning, and being such a small operation in the grander terms it was a huge success - at that stage of the war a very, very much needed fillip to public morale, and what a cast of characters - 

• the ‘boffin’ Reg Jones - acerbic, not suffering fools gladly, but undoubtedly a genius; 
• the peacock Mountbatten (Hasting's sets his stall out early on how he sees his performance), the troubled husband of Daphne Du Maurier (also seemingly mad as a bucketful of frogs); 
• Gen. ’Boy’ Browning, who commanded the Airborne Division; with a reputation now tarnished by his performance there, but who Hastings thinks may now have been overly criticised and deserves recognition of the huge work he did in first establishing and building the Airborne Division;
• ‘Colonel Remy’, the French secret agent whose men reconnoitred Bruneval at HUGE risk; 
• Major John Frost, who led the paras into action - in Hastings' (and my) opinion the perfect battlefield commander who would never have suited higher command ;
• Charlie Cox, the little RAF technician who stripped the Würzburg and did his parachute training in a single day - what a hero;
• Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, a legendary bomber pilot who led the drop squadron (but was backwards in coming forwards to admit that his plane was one of those that mis-dropped 😏)..
• Tony Hill who flew the photo reconnaissance Spitfire that bought back the pictures so badly needed by the planners
• Fred Cook the RAN officer commanding HMS Tormentor (the former Household Brigade Yacht Club at the mouth of the River Hamble) and responsible for the Naval element of the operation

..and so many more..

Brilliant book - very much recommended - going to give this one a 10+

* Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, once said to Mountbatten (allegedly) "You are so crooked, Dickie, that if you swallowed a nail, you would shit a corkscrew". 😏

Normal service...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

.. should be resumed soon... 🤞

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Apologies*, Steve the Wargamer was in urgent need of some sun, warmth and brightness^ so I've been in the Caribbean for a couple of weeks..  no military history of note, and no wargaming, but loads of good books read, and cheap local lager drunk... 😏

Spent a fair amount of time on this one... 

*With all due respect to my reader, clearly I'm not..  😁

^A friend of mine likens the winter in Britain to be something like living in a grey Tupperware box..  very apt...😏

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...