Herring Wars - Operation Kamerad

 Tim has been running a hypothetical late nineteenth/early twentieth century conflict between Denmark and Norway for some years now, "The Herring Wars". This is mainly an excuse to drag out lovely 1/1200th scale models of pre dreadnoughts, armoured cruisers etc but for various reasons I've missed every single session!

The rules themselves are fairly simple, but combat is resolved using Fred Jane type ship silhouettes as seen below.

If the ship is large and nearby, use a big template, small and far away, use a small template. They go into the custom shooting box. Instead of dropping darts on them as Fred Jane did however...

The actual firing is resolved by using Britains 25pdrs firing matchsticks at the targets. Here are the deadly guns lined up waiting for action. Of all the Britains various spring loaded guns, we've found over the years that the 25pdr is invariably the most accurate and powerful.

This time we were up at Tapton and making use of the very handy gridded floor in the main Masonic Lodge room. The original orders for each contingent had been written by various 'Admirals' scattered around the globe, I was cast as German , and Admiral von Holtzendorff (Micheal over in the US) had ordered me to locate and shadow a Russian squadron believed to be transiting the area. The first few moves were adjudicated hidden using these huge playing cards (easily A4 sized), and each square represents around 2 nautical miles.

A pair of Norwegian (?) armoured cruisers, delightful metal models from Navis (?) in Germany. Even the turrets rotate... hideously expensive models and we were under strict orders about when and where we were allowed to walk on the floor. Russell commanded the Norwegians.

We were aware that the Danes and Norwegians were out there, but what they were up to was anyones guess. My orders were to avoid an engagement unless attacked, I was basically to show the flag and shadow the Russians across the table.

Three Danish torpedo boats. Stacking too many ships in a square risked a collision, less of a problem with small ships, but you certainly didn't want to stack too many battleships or cruisers. Major turns required a dice roll, easy for small ships, harder for big ones and modified by damage sustained.

John commanded the Danes.

The main Danish battle squadron, a battleship and a pair of cruisers. We rolled each turn for visibility (the Skagerrac is notorious for fog banks etc) ands ships within a few squares were revealed. There were a number of dummies too. These guys are sailing a bit close to the wind in terms of collision risk.

My squadron eventually revealed itself as we approached an interesting (and slow moving set of cards). KMS Strassburg, (a Konigsberg class light cruiser) and a pair of torpedo boats. We'd been ordered to stay in one square to ease signalling, but we did seem a bit packed in. 

Fortunately in the distance was our target, a big old Russian battleship and a cruiser. They were wisely spread out, as the BB needed a 3+ to make a turn. Jerry was commanding the Russians The big surprise was that also in attendance was HMS Weymouth, a Royal Navy cruiser (commanded by Diego).

I had orders for a pre arranged signal to send to the Russians and a flurry of signal lamps ensued as we all attempted to hail each other and inform everyone of our identity and intentions. The poor weather and lack of skill of our signallers repeatedly interfered with our efforts, and only fragmentary messages were received. It was apparent no-one was shooting at anyone else so we all sailed eastwards in amiable company.

Further east a Danish airship had spotted some Norwegian fishing boats. Or are they Japanese torpedo boats?

There suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of warships in close proximity, but repeatedly bad weather hampered sighting attempts. There were sounds of gunfire as a squadron of Danish torpedo boats found one of the Norwegian fishing fleets and started to sink it! I'm fairly sure that is piracy on the high seas.

The Royal Navy (HMS Sussex?) investigates the Danish battleship. There seemed to be quite a few RN ships floating around. This particular encounter passed peacefully.

In the face of the Danish aggression, the other Norwegian fishing fleet scattered. The Royal Navy went tearing off to see what the Scandinavians were up to. 

In the south the Danes broke off their attacks after a number of TBDs became fouled in fishing nets. We and the Russians turned south and started to look for survivors, being a bit careful after a couple of dodgy turning rolls. We finally seemed to have established satisfactory communications and sailed along in convoy.

One of the nice things about Tapton are the great lunches! Meat pie, chips, mushy peas, gravy and Hendersons, washed down with a pint. Mmmmm.

Back in the hell of the Skagerrac, a major action developed between the Danes and Norwegians. Danish Torpedo Boats engaged Norwegian cruisers and came off rather worst (the big red golf tees).

Even the Danish battleship got into action, but in all the excitement I'm afraid I forgot to take enough pictures!

Having seen the Russians safely across the Skagerrac and into the Baltic, my squadron headed north towards the sound of the gunfire.

But by then both the Danes and Norwegians had broken off the action, neither apparently wanted to risk significant damage to their major surface units. You can see the damaged TBDs retreating past the fishing boats, and the rest of the Danes pulling back further north shadowed by the Royal Navy.

As the fighting had obviously finished, we called it a day at that point and did a round robin washup of what our various orders and aims had been. The Russians and Germans had managed their transit of the sea without major incident, the Norwegians claimed a winning draw based on how many ships/fishing boats they had sunk, but had clearly come off the worst in the encounter. The Royal Navy had however signally failed to keep the peace.

That was lots of fun and I found it quite inspiring. I don't do huge amounts of naval gaming but I thought the rules might work quite well with my Russo-Japanese War stuff, although I'd have to come up with some sort of dice system to resolve hits on the various sizes of target.