Fort Fisher at Shedquarters

 I was very honoured to be invited to a games day at Grahams mythical 'Shedquarters' in Northamptonshire.

The shed itself! Although today we were playing a lawn game.

Tim was running the game and as I've done this sorts of thing before, I was helping out. We've actually done Fort Fisher before, the Union naval assault on the fort in 1865. some wikipedia background here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fort_Fisher

The fort itself was built on a long headland (seen above) and commanded the approaches to Charlestone.

The Union 'secret weapon' was this captured CSA blockade runner, packed with 300 tons of gunpowder and to be employed rather like HMS Campbeltown at St Nazaire. I was in charge of this as a player-umpire.

The extensive fortifications were largely earthworks with various gun batteries dotted along them. This is at the river end.

The central portion of the fortifications. Chris K and Richard ran the Confederate defenders.

The mighty Union fleet. Chris A was the Admiral and Kevin the land commander with a reinforced infantry division available (four Regiments and a detachment of sharpshooters) plus three other subordinate commanders.

The fleet disposed of three ironclads, two battleships, four transport ships and a bomb ketch.

I was particularly taken with this monitor and 'Gene Kelly' dancing on the foredeck.

We had to come up with a cunning plan to assault and capture the fort, the complication being that the army was responsible for the land bit and the navy for the water bit. Each transport ship could carry a regiment, but only had enough boats to transport half a regiment at a time. After some negotiation we decided to attack the fort at the river entrance, after the naval bombardment had disrupted the defences and the bomb ship had blown a hole in it.

The fleet set off along the coast, Ironclads in the lead, battleships behind and transports out to sea. This turned out to be an error as the ironclads proved somewhat unreliable and kept drifting off course. At least we'd left enough sea room to avoid accidentally beaching any of the wayward ships.

Meanwhile, the bomb ship had beached itself at the river mouth and I lit the fuse and rowed hurriedly away. The CSA sent a scout to investigate.

Meanwhile the fleet was busily shelling the defences as they sailed along, mainly destroying the embankment to the east but not hitting many of the defending batteries.

The bomb ship eventually detonated, but was of course too far away to do significant damage to the battery, although it did damage the earthworks.

Meanwhile I was busy rowing away pursed by a shark.

But eventually made it to the safety of an ironclad which I gratefully boarded.

Where I discovered to my surprise that apparently the Army had decided on a different plan and were starting to debark right in the centre of the defences. The Army claimed to have told the Navy about this. but neither myself nor Chris were any the wiser.

The transports started to unload offshore, so it would take a few turns to row ashore. Unloading right in front of the strongest defences which hadn't even been shelled by the navy didn't strike me as very wise.

View from the far end. The beach visible in the foreground had been attacked in the First Battle of Fort Fisher, so was now heavily mined by the Confederates. The damaged section of embankment was the orange coloured section nearest the camera.

The first boats made it to the beach under heavy close range cannon fire. The real tragedy for the Union was that by this point the Confederate artillery only had a couple of turns fire left, if they had just waited a bit longer, the CSA gunners would have been defenceless.

Tim supervises proceedings. The prone position is required to fire the matchstick firing cannon. After weeks of drought Graham provide us with headless matches to mitigate the fire risk, but they had very interesting ballistic characteristics!

The Union infantry did get ashore in some numbers but rather than waiting for successive waves just advanced piecemeal against the defences with predictable results. They did make an attempt to get through the damaged section of embankment late in the game, but it was all too little too late and after a while it was fairly obvious the attack had failed.

In real life (and the previous two games) the Union blew there way through an undefended bit of the defences and then rolled up the fortifications from a flank, but the command confusion was just too great in this instance. As Clausewitz said, everything in war is simple, but the simple things become very difficult. Never has there been a better demonstration that you don't need complex C2 rules,  just lots of players.

That was loads of fun and everyone had a good go at firing matchsticks all over the garden. As we'd finished a bit early, Graham organised another game (Asculum with Neil Thomas Ancients) but sadly the jet lag had caught up with me and I headed for home instead as it was a fair way to Sheffield and I didn't feel great.

Many thanks to Graham for hosting and to Tim for running the game. I'm looking forward to a return visit.