For a brief time, it appeared that the introduction of Chinese troops into the struggle for northern Burma might allow the Allied forces to hold onto the Burma Road. However, the splintered Allied command could not cope with the speed of Japanese movement. The recently introduced Japanese 56th Division had charged from Toungoo to Lashio, which lay astride the Burma Road. General Stilwell ordered an attack from the east which utterly failed. On western end of the road, Stiilwell ordered remnants of the Chinese 200th Division to attack at Taunggyi. Two days later, Stilwell found the Chinese troops in a state of inertia sitting in front of Taunggyi. When orders failed to arouse action, Stilwell offered men a reward of 50,000 rupees if they secured Taunggyi by that evening. This financial incentive sent the hungry division into a frenzy of activity.
A short PTO action pitting around a dozen squads eof Chinese and 10.5 Japanese against each other. The Chinese are an Elite formation (though still burdened with ELR: 2), the Japanese a 1st Line force that receive 3 squads of Elite reinforcements. The Chinese have armor support in the form of two Russian-built tanks. Note that these do have radios. The Japanese can set up all over the board an have one squad equivalent of HIP capability. The Japanese need to have a number of non-hut buildings at game end held with GO MMC. The trouble for the Japanese is, that they do not have enough troops to contest all potential victory buildings. They have to decide whether to concentrate on one specific area or if they want to assign some of their force to delay the Chinese and/or force them to split their attacking force. My Japanese defenders opted for the latter, building something that was supposed to look "strong" out of a combination of real units and Dummies. Furthermore, I placed the HIPsters so that they could either pop up out of nowhere late in the game to possibly retake a Chinese building or to spring a trap on the advancing Chinese. My aim was to divide the Chinese force and then to reinforce the "stronger" Japanese force to hold the rear non-hut buildings hoping that the delayed Chinese forces would be out of time to make superior Chinese numbers count. This plan worked out pretty well. On top, the Japanese MTR and the INF gun had some nice ROF of limited efficiency, enough, however, to break two Chinese squads. A Japanese Sniper further managed to kill a Chinese 8-0 Leader and to break two accompanying squads by LLMC. With no surviving Chinese leader on one side of the Japanese held village in combinations with four broken squads in the area and the other Chinese force still not having taken the outlying two building-combo at the end of turn 3, the Chinese resigned. It seems a bit tough on the Chinese if Japanese and Chinese act as if described above.
2015-12-23
(A) Andy Beaton
vs
Jonathan Kay
Japanese win
Chinese were luckier in CC than they should have been but the ELR 2 made it tough to keep an effective force together
