Colonel Kagemusha in Action!

This turn there’s a lot of forced marching going on and only one battle to be fought. The Chinese Warlord, Bolsheviks, British Museum Expedition and the Mad Baron have all decided that it’s far too cold to try to fight anyone else and have found a nice warm yurt to hole up in for the winter.

They will all be FORCE MARCHING in the general direction of Urga, with the outcome to be decided in due course by the D6 of doom.

The Japanese Flying Column and the French Expedition are, however, made of sterner stuff so will be battling it out to see if they can get ahead in the race to the campaign objective.

The French have ATTACKED the Japanese, so expect to see a fiendishly cunning defensive strategy deployed by the Japanese master of artful cunning himself, Colonel Kagemusha, who they can employ this turn as a Special Character.

We can now reveal the results of Turn One of the Back of Beyond campaign.

Brigadier (Retd.) Cholmondely Warner of the British Museum Expedition and Wei Phat Mac, the Chinese Warlord, both won their battles so will now advance one step closer to Urga and are, therefore, five steps away from the campaign objective.

WORKERS! PEASANTS! COMRADES!

The recent cowardly and unprovoked attack by imperialist counter revolutionary forces on the Third Workers and Peasants Shock Brigade must not sway us from our duty to spread the message of proletarian revolution to the downtrodden masses of Mongolia!

It is a mere inconsequential set back that we face in our inevitable and irrepressible onward progress to Urga. There we will be able to provide fraternal support to our Mongolian brothers and sisters, as they struggle to overcome the decadent repressive bourgeois counter revolutionary forces of imperialist  aggression that have so recently sabotaged our efforts.

It is clear that these saboteurs must have infiltrated our ranks and caused our tanks to blow up and our aircraft to crash in flames! Only such an underhand and cowardly wrecking can explain the outcome of our battle with the British Museum and it’s so called archaeological expedition, a shabby camouflage for an imperialist counter revolutionary intervention no less!

Fear not Comrades, for I have telegrammed a full report of this dastardly attack to our central party apparatus, in which I have requested armoured train reinforcements to replace our losses and to bring the full might of proletarian justice to bear on these capitalist agents of reactionary repression.

Onward to Victory!

Comrade Colonel Igor Tubugerov

(big words by People’s Commissar Nasti Tchestikov)

As previously reported by Wei Phat Mac himself no less, this was a decisive victory for the Chinese Warlord and his fanatically loyal rag tag army.  It started well for the eponymous generalissimo, with a Special Character, the shady arms dealer Herbert Maximoff, providing a captured Red Army Austin armoured car as a temporary reinforcement for the Chinese.

This enabled the Chinese Warlord to deploy his army in a pincer formation, using the armoured cars to protect his flanks whilst advancing in the centre with his cavalry and infantry, holding the elite Dare to Die and Assault troops in reserve. The Japanese responded by deploying their infantry and cavalry in extended line using a combined arms approach, covered by an armoured car, supporting artillery and heavy machine guns.

In the initial turns, the centre ground became the scene of a hard fought fire fight, with the Japanese infantry and cavalry advancing to meet the Chinese forces. Both sides suffered crippling casualties in the exchange of rifle and machine gun fire, although the Japanese seemed to take the brunt of the damage. Before long the action descended in to a series of hand to hand melees, with the cavalry and infantry of both sides engaged in a slogging match to decide the day.

In the end, the hand to hand close combat took a massive toll on both the Chinese and the Japanese forces but the weight of fire from the Chinese armoured cars, the stubbornness  of the Chinese  foot troops  in the melee and the cumulative losses on the Japanese side led to the Chinese sweeping the field. The Imperial Japanese commander, General Sushi Miyagi, ordered a fighting retreat and the disciplined remnants of his once proud army disengaged to fight another day.

A humdinger indeed and a great start to the campaign!