A Taiping battle: 2nd Hukou (1860)

A mere eight years ago, I invested in a four-volume work in Chinese: a military history of that immense yet unknown conflict, the Taiping Rebellion. (As I recorded at the time here.) Obviously I meant to generate scenarios from it, but competing priorities, lack of time, paucity of other sources, and especially the language obstacle meant this project has lain fallow ever since - until last year, when OWS made a new friend. Jeremy speaks Chinese and has studied this war seriously. He is back in Hong Kong now, has access to good Chinese sources, and has been working on BBB scenarios for it.

I was excited to see his first one arrive on our tabletop at OWS this week. Stalwart OWS member Bob Medcraft laid it on for us. Bob's garage is full of armies of all nations and eras, so it was no great problem for him to rustle up a battle's worth of 19th-century Chinese in 15mm scale. (Actually, that's not fair - although he had enough miscellaneous Oriental troops for the core of the two armies already, he did paint up dozens of extra figures specially. Some of these were figures he and some other gamers had got Steve Barber to sculpt as private commission a while ago.)

The scenario in question was for the Second Battle of Hukou (22 December 1860). This was a tricky one for Jeremy to reconstruct as he had to interpret and reconcile conflicting sources, as well as tracking down a good map. The strategic situation is that the Taipings were trying to capture the city of Wuchang, far up the Yangtze from their capital of Nanjing. To do so, they sent four widely separated columns to converge on it. One of these, some 30,000 men under Yang Fuqing, was to capture Hukou, secure water transport there, and then reach Wuchang by river. The Qing government forces defending Hukou had about 25,000 poor infantry in a stockaded defensive line east of Hukou, backed up by 15,000 or so cavalry, plus a small garrison in the town itself and adjacent fort. The stockade line had its right resting on a river and its left against a ridge of steep hills running alongside the Yangtze.

There were five victory locations: the three stockades; Hukou itself; and the village of Sanli, halfway between them. The Taipings could earn an Objective each for Hukou and Sanli; one more for taking any two of the three stockades; and another one if they held either Hukou or Sanli and the Qings failed to evacuate at least five infantry units up the Yangtze. They needed two Objectives to earn a draw or three to win.

Here's how our game of this unusual and exotic battle went.

Qing defenders of the northernmost stockade. Each stockade counted as a Town in BBB terms, capable of holding one infantry unit, and had two artillery units in front of it in 'Rifle Pits' (1 level of cover). The first line of Qing infantry was Raw and Passive - and these were their better troops. 15mm figures from Bob's collection, I think a mix of Khurasan, Steve Barber, maybe some Eureka.

View of the whole stockade line. Hukou is the sandy-coloured felt top right, beyond the wooded ridge. (Bob mostly plays competition games where a few bits of felt is sufficient terrain, so he forgot to bring any trees or buildings.) The second line of infantry is Peng Chunyao's Hunanese contingent - these were not only Raw and Passive but Fragile as well. Behind them is a mass of regular cavalry. All the Qings started the battle Disrupted because the Taipings attacked at dawn.

Pan out some more and we see the Taiping attackers arrayed. All the Taipings were rated Aggressive and at least Trained. Three infantry units were classed as Veteran 'Guards'. The little 2-base unit and artillery on the right centre hill, flanking the stockade line, was a force of 'picked men' that included a British sailor, Augustus Lindley, whose account is one of the sources Jeremy used.

Crispin and Phil commanded the Qings. Bob took the Taiping left, I had the centre, and Dave W our right. Our plan, such as it was, was for Bob to pin the Qings frontally while I rolled up the stockades from the right and Dave pushed through towards Sanli and Hukou.

A closer look at the Qings in the stockades. Even though Jeremy created a special weapon class, 'Chinese Artillery' (CA), with lower firepower than normal Western smoothbore cannon, that artillery proved formidable.

Our attack develops on the right. I get my two blue brigades onto the hill above the stockades' flank. The picked men and a supporting brigade rout a Qing effort at a spoiling counterattack and stand atop the ridge. However, this has left them Disrupted, Low on Ammo and exposed.

Crispin and Phil take due advantage. Dave's picked men are overrun by massed cavalry. However, my thin white line repels a Qing infantry brigade.

Freshly squeezed Mandarins! The Taipings' turn to attack again. As per the plan, we stormed the first stockade, routing some Qing brigades. The blue brigade is one of mine that exploited one victory and achieved a second. However, in retrospect, that may have been a mistake, as it was left exposed to a subsequent flank attack.

A couple of turns of see-saw counter-attack and counter-counter-attack ensued. The exposed brigade has fallen back Spent out of shot beyond lower left corner. We launched more attacks to try to take advantage of the Qing counter-attackers' Disruption. As their growing collection of blue 'Spent' counters shows, we smashed some back, but that left us Disrupted (yellow counters) and vulnerable in turn. In particular, that left-hand unit in green drove back its foes, only to unmask two batteries at cannister range. That didn't go well.

On our far right, one Taiping Guards unit approaches the fort by the Yangtze protecting Hukou. No further progress was possible here. Note the impeccably manicured fingers of the Qing mandarin. Long plaited moustache just out of shot.

I think we played seven turns out of 10. My blue brigade holds a stockade but Qing counter-attackers have advanced past its left. There are too many of them, and too few of us, for us to take any more of the stockade line. Our one glimmer of hope is the white-coated unit just visible top right. This (plus three other units behind it) would have had a good chance of taking the village of Sanli (sandy felt top right) and cutting the Qing evacuation route. If we'd had time to play the last couple of turns and managed to take and hold Sanli, it would have been a draw; otherwise, a Qing victory. 

The victorious Qing commanders fly their banners proudly.

Reflections:

The virtues of 15mm. I know there are other players who use 15mm for BBB, but at OWS we almost always use 6mm or 10mm. It was a nice change to 'go large' and see individual soldiers more clearly. We had enough figures on the table for it to still look like a battle, not a skirmish. One minor disadvantage was that Bob's base frontages were larger than the standard BBB 1" (I guess 40mm), so initial deployments were slightly more cramped than the scenario envisaged, but otherwise it worked fine.

The exotic East. We all loved the fact that we were dipping our toes in the Yangtze and learning about the Taiping Rebellion. Fundamentally it's still just 19th-century horse and musket, of course. But Jeremy's addition of Chinese weapon types and his use of standard BBB attributes to rate the two very different armies' troops captured the different flavour of this war.

Terrain aesthetics. To capture it fully, we really needed pagodas in the town, Chinese buildings in the villages, and junks on the Yangtze. Not to mention some trees in the woods (couldn't see the trees for the woods? shouldn't it be the other way round?). Hopefully we'll be better equipped next time.

Complex situations make interesting scenarios. A simple assault on a stockade line wouldn't have been much fun. (See my essay on frontal assault games here.) The fact that we had a flank option, plus an evacuation route to threaten, gave both sides more choices to make, more scope for maneuver, and more interesting things to do.

Historical research. Huge kudos to Jeremy for his work in taking conflicting sources, making sense of them, tracking down necessary geographical and other details, and turning all this into a historically accurate and eminently playable scenario that brought some obscure and fascinating history to life for us players. This is what BBB is all about!