Faceoff

Hey Everyone

I've been doing some traveling lately, which affected how many posts I can put up so far, hope you guys would understand. JQ has been busily painting his figs, and I also have some figs in store to shoot with...so expect a much larger variety of units/minis in the near future...

In particular, this post will feature the last shot from our batch of warhammer photos and hang on tight to see new ones flood this blog soon! This time, we have another shot by WT of a Chaos and Bret/Empire faceoff that signals impending doom and a glimpse at glory for members of either side...which is more or less determined by their survivability (which Chaos has more than an average human).


I'm probably stating the obvious that wars are a gamble. With so much death going on in wars, isn't it unsettling that campaigns can turn out to be frankly useless? In any armed conflict, from medieval times to modern warfare, we are witness to seeing soldiers dying in vast multitudes by following orders from above, even as the commanders themselves cannot be fully sure of the necessity of the benefit of victory in their campaigns. Thankfully in WFB we're only rolling dice and dealing with the fictional...imagining campaigns or even participating in GW campaigns (eg. Storm of Chaos), and only losing miniatures vs. being responsible for human lives.

I've been reading a magazine called WWII Quarterly, which (of course) featured articles on various conflicts during the war...and one of them was Peleliu Island (which was featured in CoD:WAW). During this campaign, the US forces (Marine and Army) met the fury of a dogged Japanese defense that ate through the Americans as they formed a beachhead and advanced into the Island. The fighting was so fierce that the battle had the highest rate of US casualties of the Pacific theatre.

1st wave of LVTs arriving at Peleliu.

The US commanders intended to neutralize Japanese presence on Pereliu to prevent interference with MacArthur's planned invasion of the Philippines, as Pereliu geographically flanked the Philippines...but it turned out that previous intelligence assessments were right: the Japanese on Peleliu lacked amphibious/aerial ability to effectively land soldiers on the Philippines to be of any threat to MacArthur. In consequence, the Americans did not achieve significant strategic importance from a campaign with such high costs of lives and equipment. It's pretty evident that commanders have a whole load of responsibilities especially with the lives of the soldiers they command, whose death cannot be reversed. Personally, a true realization of this responsibility can only come from war, and not in peacetime armies (such the Singapore Armed Forces I was in).

Although it maybe unsettling that we all are also liable to invest so much in something that turns out to be useless, we hopefully become wiser and always know that in life (or at least in wargaming), there will be always another day to keep rolling the dice...