The Fate of the Day: book review

I recently finished the second volume of Rick Atkinson’s trilogy of the American Revolution. The full title is The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780. Quite pleased, I look forward to the third volume. I liked the first volume; The British are Coming. My review of the first is here.

 

I like the second volume even better. Other books about the revolution I’ve read over the years are concerned with the events in and close by US territory. Once France (and later Spain and Holland) entered the war against Britain, it became a world war. Atkinson covers much more of this than I’m used to. One example is the naval battle of Ushant, when nature decided to smite both fleets after they had beaten each other up.

 

The abortive sieges of Newport, Fort George and Savannah are covered. Goodness, Pulaski was mighty brave and mighty foolhardy. I had thought he did his mad attack under stress, not that he led the Continental storm of a fortress with his cavalry.

 

The Royal Navy blockade strangling of the colonial economy is covered in detail. The runaway inflation makes our recent difficulties with that fade into insignificance. The Navy  also raided coastal towns, burning buildings, sacking and looting.

 

The mighty struggles in Parliament are covered, as pressure against continuing the expensive, bloody war mounted. In 1780, the Gordon riots erupted, something I was basically unaware of. Nominal anti-Catholic riots soon metastasized into a general uprising by the poor against the propertied classes. Cabinet members were dragged from their carriages and assaulted. Columns of smoke rose over London from burning buildings. The riots lasted a week. King George finally managed to concentrate 11,000 troops in London and they smashed the rioters, killing over 280 of them. This wasn’t easy, since so much of the army was either in America, Canada, the Caribbean, India or other outposts around the world, fighting Washington or the French. Some 800 to 1,000 lives were lost, including those shot by the soldiers. The damage to buildings in London wouldn’t be surpassed until the 1940 Blitz.

 

One result was that many of the propertied who had been on the verge of uproar against the war in the colonies chose backing North and the King over anarchy. The war would continue.

 

The war in 1780 resembled two bloody and exhausted barroom brawlers who wouldn’t quit, each hoping the other would collapse first. Of course, we know that the treasure being poured out by France would lead directly to their own revolution a few years after this one finally ended.

 

Atkinson has set himself a high bar for the third volume. I await it anxiously.  

Huzzah! 2025 Convention

 Last Saturday I drove down from Georgetown to the convention in South Portland, signed in for the game “Between Two Fires”. The scenario was based on the British withdrawal from Concord along Battle Road. The rules were Fistful of Lead: Bigger Battles. The original Fistful of Lead were western gunfight rules that have since spawned a number of period variants. Last year a scenario based on fighting outside Bastogne in 1944 was played at the convention. I wasn’t fast enough signing up. I’ve never played any of the Fistful of Lead (FOL) rules, so this was my maiden voyage.

I ended up commanding a company of British grenadiers and a weaker light company. The other British player, who had once played FOL before, had a similar command and the Lt. Colonel in charge. The rebels had three full strength companies, one of them being light infantry, all irregulars. We were attempting to clear the road to Boston for the rest of the force behind us. 

We didn’t have a plan beyond that. My ad-hoc improvisations ensured that I suffered severely as a result. FOL proceeds by card play using a standard deck of cards. My light infantry activated first and filled their cartridge boxes. I should have activated the grenadiers first and saved the lights for later. My grenadiers blocked the road when the other grenadiers activated before them. It was a sign of things to come.

 

Next, I had my grenadiers move over the wall to their right, where I discovered how slowly they moved in the dense woods. A fairly large party of enemy light troops was in the woods and my light company crossed over to help deal with them. My grenadiers next got back into the road, formed in a formation that looked like a column, though all units on both sides were in a loose mob.

 

Now this apparent column on the road faced a rebel unit in a loose line behind a wall. My ingrained column-loses-firefight-to-line kicked in. In truth, all my figures could fire, so the firefight wasn’t as one-sided as it appeared.   But that’s hindsight. At the time, I marched into close range, hoping their first fire would be unlucky. Instead, they rolled a tad over average, shooting a number of my lads down and putting a lot of shock on them. The Lt. Colonel used his special activation card to remove three of their four shock markers. Thank you, Lt. Colonel! My next activation was a wild card, used as a queen of hearts. This brought two of my casualties back, crying “I’m not dead yet”. I decided to charge, hoping the rebels would run from cold steel. Wrong, they stood and beat me back into the road. Another rebel unit then fired into me and caused the remaining grenadiers to flee into the woods. My next activation saw the real queen of hearts bring back one more casualty and my grenadiers stayed out of the line of fire for the rest of the game.

 

Meanwhile the two understrength British light companies slowly whittled down the tenacious rebel light troops in the woods. As the game wound down Crown forces obviously had not cleared the road to Boston. We had lost much more heavily than the rebels and most of our losses were my poor grenadiers. Promotion was not in the cards for me, unless my parents could pony up the funds for a serious purchase. 

Hindsight says I should have moved up the road rapidly with my light company covering my left, peppered the rebels, drawn their first fire at long range and then tried to roust them. It would still have been a hard row to hoe but hopefully better than the disaster that I perpetrated.

 

The table was gorgeous and the game master had done a great paint job on his Perry miniatures. We had played 7 or 8 turns in a tad under 3 hours. Of the five players, only two had any experience with FOL rules. Well done and the conversation around the table was agreeable.

 

Now for my take on the rules. First, let me say that I only speak for my taste, each to their own.

 

I am not a fan of various types of dice in a single game. This used D12, D10 and D8 dice. The card activation sometimes kind of died down. Each unit gets a card, and each officer, including the company commanders. If their unit doesn’t have shock to rally (and possibly some other things that I’ve since forgot), when their card is drawn, they have nothing to do. Waiting at the tail end of each turn for officers to activate and then do nil slows the game. On the other hand, the card activation creates some chaos, which is always a good thing. I liked the scale of the game but am not sold on all the mechanisms.

 

The fellow across the table who shellacked me was Nathaniel St. John, who has published a set of American Civil War rules called The Devil to Pay. The rules are available online for free https://www.thedeviltopay.com/ . Each player is a brigade CO, with 3-5 regiments and a battery. It uses D6s solely. There are only 14 cards played in a turn. I’d use chits since that saves shuffling. Toss ‘em in a cup and shake. When troops activate, all players on that side activate. Not knowing what phase comes next ads to the chaos, which, as said before, is a good thing.

 

Possible drawbacks are the number of markers needed to indicate orders and hits. I’ll make some small and discrete ones. Also, every base (not yet hit) rolls a D6 needing 4+ for a hit. Some turns might see serious damage. On the other hand, it should give a fast game.  Like Loose Files and American Scramble, once a unit has a hit for each base, any additional hits cause lost bases. The rules do allow units to skedaddle before the next card (or chit) is drawn, at the cost of becoming disordered.

 

I hope to give these a try. Been looking for a set of rules where the base units are regiments (battalions) and batteries. We’ve been playing Bloody Big Battles where the base units are brigades or divisions. Excellent games for whole large battles, but sometimes you want to know the 114^th Pennsylvania is going in.

 

Here are some pictures of other games I saw, lovely tables and figures.

Book Review: The Swamp Fox

I picked up this 2016 biography of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution in a Goodwill store in Maine. Best $2 purchase I’ve made in quite a long time, possibly ever. John Oller wrote a fine biography of Marion’s life, including before and after the war.

 

I've long had an interest in Marion, starting with the ancient Disney TV series “The Swamp Fox” featuring young Leslie Nielson (Airplane, Naked Gun) as Marion. In the series young Marion romanced the comely daughter of middle-aged Banastre Tarleton, when not raiding, ambushing and escaping. A book for young adults opened my eyes to artistic license when I found Marion was middle-aged and Tarleton a young man in his early 20s, no child in sight.

 

Later came that preposterous film The Patriot. The fiction was so blatant that they changed the names of the principals. Marion (Mel Gibson) became Ben Martin, and Tarleton became William Tavington. Martin was a Rambo-style super-killer, disposing of a full British infantry company early in the film with a little help from his three pre-pubescent sons. The British commit war crimes that rival those of the SS. The war in the south was truly nasty, but churches were not packed full of civilians and set afire.

 

Oller’s book reveals that Marion was 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds. His strong suit was brain, not brawn. Early in the war he was a Lt. Col in the 2^nd South Carolina Continental Regiment. He escaped the catastrophic siege of Charleston by being on the injured list. He then raised a unit in the tidewater region, loosening his command style to avoid alienating his militia volunteers. They followed this tiny man. He didn’t lead from the front, instead hanging back to figure out when to commit his slender reserves, or when to cut and run. He worked hard to avoid heavy losses.

 

Ambushes and raids were his stock in trade. Once, a mixed force of Crown troops set out to abolish him and his “brigade”. Marion eluded them, burning bridges to delay them. Then he repulsed an enemy attempt to cross a bridge under fire. With supplies running low, the Crown force then headed to the coast, with Marion’s fighters snapping at their heels. The hunted became the hunters.

 

His small brigade put up a creditable showing at the one open field battle they participated in, Eutaw Springs in 1781, trading fire with British troops.

Marion suffered his one clear defeat during the long period between Yorktown and the final peace. Called back from his seat in the South Carolina legislature, he arrived as the fight was under way, when he had not picked the time or place of the fight.

 

He was a slave-owner. His will set three individuals free, but not the enslaved Buddy who accompanied him during the war. On the other hand, the British only freed enslaved people who escaped from rebels. Those enslaved by loyalists got short shrift.

 

I found this an excellent book about Marion and the war in the south. It may well give you ideas for small actions. Descriptions of the principal actors abound, with both strengths and flaws on display.

 

Spoiler: the film has Martin slay Tavilton in single combat at the end (you don’t need to see the film anyway). Marion never personally crossed swords with Tarleton. The Duke of Wellington would have been pleased if he had, since Tarleton ended up being Wellington’s persistent critic in Parliament for many years.

Edit: it is noteworthy that for a lengthy period after the fall of Charleston and the rout of Camden, Marion's guerillas were the only rebel force in Tidewater South Carolina. The book made clear that the guerillas of Sumter in the piedmont and Pickens in the mountains were the other flickers of resistance.