Sort of Gaming the Battles for Chattanooga

The historical setup for the Battle of Lookout Mountain.  This is an accurate depiction of the situation as of 11AM on November 24, 1863.  Hooker is ready to attack Walthall's and Moore's brigades attached to Stevenson's division.  This is from the cyberboard module I created for personal use from the 1997 Command Magazine game, Chattanooga: Death Knell of the Confederacy.

I have spent a lot of time reading and studying the Chattanooga Campaign since visiting the battle grounds there in January and February.  It is a nice distraction in these extraordinary times.  Though I have enjoyed a military interest in the War Between the States all my life, I never gave the Battle of Missionary Ridge and other military encounters there much consideration.  It seemed like a lopsided victory for the Union and was probably second only to the Battle of Nashville as a decisive defeat suffered by the Army of Tennessee.

But, as usual when one starts to pay more attention to something, the real story is far more interesting than previously believed.  I read Dave Powell’s recent books on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.  They were invaluable in planning my trips.  I also owned first editions of The Shipwreck of Their Hopes by Peter Cozzens (1994) and Mountains Touched With Fire by Wiley Sword (1995) but I had never read either of them.  I only skimmed through their pages, looking at the photographs and maps, seeing these books merely as part of my “complete” collection on the war.

During the time of my visits and immediately after them, I read both books while revisiting Powell’s works to gain a more crystalline view of how Chattanooga turned out the way it did on the heels of the great Battle of Chickamauga.  In reading these books I naturally fell into my previously stated mental state of wanting to see what Chattanooga looked like in wargame terms.  Again, for me reading and wargaming go hand-in-hand where military history is concerned.

It just so happens that I have an old wargame published in Command Magazine back in 1997 but never played.  I bought it for much the same reasons I bought the books by Cozzens and Sword without ever reading them.  I was playing Civil War games often back then; most frequently the previously mentioned Civil War, Brigade Series (CWBS).

But this game was a joke compared to that system, too gimmicky and abstract for my tastes.  I got little in the way of historic feel from it.  I checked out the two simple (by today’s great graphic standards) maps and the artwork on the counters and it has sat in a file cabinet drawer filled with other such magazine games, some played, mostly not, for over twenty years.  Hmmm.  Does that make me a hoarder?

Anyway, it turned out to be useful now.  Since my gaming table is currently occupied with other stuff from my life as it evolves, I can’t play anything on my table at all.  I need a digital version of the game.  None existed for Chattanooga.  So I spent about two weeks scanning the maps in and creating the regimental-level counters, leaders, and various game markers.  I built it in cyberboard which is a passé platform these days.  VASSAL is today's standard.  I’m not against VASSAL, I just don’t know how to program in it like I do cyberboard.

It became a wonderful destruction for me during the present unpleasantness of the times.  My dad is almost speechless about all that is happening with the virus.  He says he doesn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.  He thinks maybe this will be the way God will take us all out of this world, which has become too terrible a place to let His human creation remain.

So, yeah.  I kind of needed a nerdy distraction from all that for a few hours every day.  In two weeks I had it built and all the scenarios created.  I designed the playing pieces to be a bit more generic than they are in the game.  I still don’t like the game's “scheme” or “mechanics” or whatever you want to call it.  So, I built the game with the idea that I could either apply the rules as presented with the game or apply these generic regiments to some hybrid rule set I might concoct in the future, assuming there is one.

It is fun to create digital versions of games and really delve in to what the game is designed to convey about this military situation.  I have done this dozens of times through the years for other games.  In this case, the scale is 250 yards per hex very close to the 200 yards in the CWBS.  

To my knowledge there is only one other board wargame ever designed representing this situation.  It was a game designed by the same Dave Powell that I complimented so highly earlier on his two books.  I might seem like a no-brainer that I would want to buy that particular wargame, but I don’t.  It is an “area movement” type of wargame and I don’t enjoy those very much because they abstract the act of movement too much.

This Command Magazine version has plenty of faults (the rule system, the many mistakes in the graphics, etc.) but it is hex-based not area-based, so naturally and perhaps paradoxically, I like the version that isn’t by the guy who wrote those great books I recently read.  And, of course, the a major reason I love wargaming is how it relates to my reading.  It makes little sense that I would prefer this game over the other but I do.

This is the historic situation just north of the ridge.  Sherman's Army of the Tennessee is about to attack Cleburne's reinforced division.  In game terms, Sherman will not be able to attack with more than two brigades at a time.  The piecemeal nature of his attacks allowed Cleburne to effectively respond to each one in its turn.  As you can see, Sherman greatly outnumbers Cleburne.  But he did not know that at the time of the battle, of course.  In game terms, Cleburne's command must be rated much higher than Sherman's to make this play out as it did historically.  I might also add that the game map is not geographically accurate for this section of the battlefield - yet another mistake.  So, I have had to make some minor adjustments to the troop positions to account for this.

Gaming the southern end of Missionary Ridge presents a challenge.  Hooker was greatly delayed in crossing Chattanooga Creek, which was flooded by recent rains, and all the bridges were burned by Stevenson as his division retreated from Lookout Mountain.  Clayton's brigade held this end of the line.  My approach in this design concept is placing Hooker's forces where they were historically after they engaged the Confederate left flank but freezing them in place until certain conditions (such as the retreat of Clayton) occur.  Playtesting is required to see if this is a valid approach.  At any rate, you can see how Hooker's appearance at Rossville Gap greatly outnumbered the thinly stretched Rebels.  Historically, Osterhaus advanced behind Missionary Ridge and captured hundreds of retreating Southerners.  Cruft and Geary attacked the ridge and advanced against minimal resistance.

So now I have been fine-tuning the historic attack by George Thomas’s troops upon Braxton Bragg atop Missionary Ridge, November 25, 1863.  Most of my information comes from Cozzens but it is clarified by Sword’s book.  The exact position of each regiment is not correct.  Most of that is because I don’t have sufficient information other than to say I know where each brigade was positioned and I know which regiments where in which brigades.  So the regiments are roughly where they should be. 

Still, Cozzens provided me with enough information to get, say, the Confederate forward line down in the rifle pits pretty close to accurate.  I’m just toying around with the game now that I have fairly accurate historical positions.  How would a game like this accurately reflect the Federal triumph at Missionary Ridge?  How would this game reflect the strengths and weaknesses of both Bragg and Thomas?  

Actually, that part is pretty simple and there are a lot of ways to get there.  I could just use the CWBS rules here.  In fact, I could make brigade counters instead of regimental ones and turn it into a CWBS game since the scales are so close - 250/200 yards per hex.  But, I've already invested all this time making hundreds regimental counters.  I think I’ll play around with things as they are here.  A downside is that regimental systems require a lot more dice rolling for combat and morale checks than brigade-level ones.  But I never intended to play this game anyway!  

So let’s see what, if anything, I come up with as far as the game aspect is concerned.  The historic aspect of the game plays out more or less like this…

Thomas orders his entire army to form a line of attack.  The corps and division commanders advance the line toward Missionary Ridge.  The line encounters the Rebel rifle pits.  There is a skirmish there and most of the pits are overwhelmed.  Many of the Confederates are captured.  Then, of their own initiative, without orders, the Federals attack Missionary Ridge (Grant wanted this to just be a "diversionary" attack).  All this time they are having to endure artillery fire from numerous Confederate batteries on the ridge.  As they approach the ridge, Rebel infantry regiments join in.  Anderson’s troops near the center of the Southern line is the first hit hard by Hazen's and Willich's brigades.  The line breaks.  The Yankees turn northward and southward and roll up the Southerners.  Bragg’s army panics and most of it runs away.  The end, in game terms.

Here's the historical situation at 4PM on November 25, 1863 as Thomas' Army of the Cumberland advances against the Southern position along Missionary Ridge.  You can see the Confederate rifle pits in a forward position at the base of the ridge.  Also notice Grant and Thomas hanging out at Orchard Knob to the rear.

The Federal forces of Granger and Palmer's corps attack the rifle pits.  The red dot on Hazen's troops indicates that they are "superior" in game terms.

As the Union troops capture the rifle pits, they force the Confederates back up Missionary Ridge.  The regiments depicted in the Confederate advanced line are all "disrupted."  Several Union regiments are disrupted in the process of dislodging them.  All such units are so marked, indicating that they are less effective and will suffer penalties in the game.

About one mile of the ridge falls to Thomas' forces.  They can now turn northward and southward along the line, attacking the remaining Rebels in front and flank.  Several Confederate regiments rout away from the ridge.  All Southern artillery batteries in this sector are captured.  More Union troops are disrupted but there are plenty of organized regiments to fall into place and continue the assault.  This is what happened historically.  The initial Federal breakthrough was at this point.

Even if I don't take all this hobby-work any further, the act of creating this digital version of the game - along with my reading - has taught me many things about the battles for Chattanooga in 1863.  And learning new things about familiar subjects is a rewarding (and fun) part of my life.