Tuesday 25 August 2015

Historical Battle of Eutaw Springs

I stumbled across an old magazine article describing the the Battle of Eutaw Springs in the southern campaign of the American RevolutionaryWar and thought it suitable for use with my War of 1812 collection - same muskets, not much cavalry.
The large 3rd Foot.  Some 400 strong at the start of the battle so at 16 stands, 64 figures.  In the rear the sheep and stone walls are new additions to my terrain  
With my collection as it is, I settled on a 1 stand = 25 men ratio or about 1:6.  While this taxed the collection to match certain troop types ( I am low on horse as the War of 1812 had very few in any of those battles) I still had half my whole collection still sitting in boxes but this historical deployment still had 29 units on the table!  By far this was the largest battle I have conducted with these, and as I only have 25 disorder markers, I can't go any larger!
The centre deployments by both armies with the British defending their camp.  

The battle started much as the historical battle did with the artillery trading fire and taking out each other, and Lee's units attacking the British left flank.  While historically the American militia traded shots and then awaited the Continental regulars to continue the advance, the game had the militia disordered so the Continentals moved through them only to the also heavily shot up by the stationary British line.  Now it was the Continentals turn to fallback through the militia in the centre which had not reformed and thus collapsed rapidly.
One American unit re-deploying -read "routing" - though another.  In this case my militia in civilian dress and those of Kentucky frontiersmen.  

On the American left the small militia units did not make any impression on the British flank elites under Majorbank and permanently retreated and the other units on the American left felt it prudent to  not advance with an open flank and against the large 3rd Foot regiment facing them.

On the American right flank, Lee's troops were now disordered and falling back had the militia units of Marion and Malmedy's Carolinians wary of any advances and in some confusion. The 64th Foot gaining an easy victory led a general advance of the British units against the many heavily disordered American units milling about in confusion.  At this point I ended the affair as the Americans would not be able to do anything but run.  The battle thus did not match the historical result and was an easy victory for the red coats.
The Kentucky-men representing Lee's Legion meeting the British "64th" foot holding the British left flank.
The Loyalist held firm

Obviously with small battles numbers and certainly morale are the biggest influences in the result.  In this scenario, I took most of the units morale assessing militia characteristics by rote and had militia quality to militia units and regulars to regulars but as historically the British line collapsed fairly rapidly and the American militia seemed to preform well (as did the Loyalists) so it will be important to assess them carefully.
Greene's army, while having "militia" units, these were no doubt filled with ex-veterans and the British regulars were in low-ebb so need some downgrading to re-create the outcome of the historical engagement.

Nevertheless,  it was fun to see the boys on the table.