A little background on my next campaign: the year is 1807ish), and oceans are battlefields. The Brits are in control, but on the far side of Africa, halfway between Old Blighty and the Indian subcontinent, the French have made a nuisance of themselves. That little fly speck just east of Madagascar is a perfect little cluster of islands that make a perfect base for privateers.
The Brits, being who they are, commit just enough forces to take these islands in 1808, but the French steal a march and reinforce the place just in time. What follows would be a thrilling two year campaign to settle once and for all who would dominate the western Indian Ocean. It’s a little conflict out in the hinterlands, but one too important for either belligerent to ignore.
The full story is too complex to go into here, but you can read a great synopsis here. The whole thing reads like an adventure novel – the fictionalized version by Dan O’Brien was Jack Aubrey’s Tue Mauritius Command – and comes complete with heartless villains, thrilling escapes, and stunning reversals on both sides of the fight.
For their part the French fought valiantly, and suffered due to the local big farm interests sandbagging out of loyalty to their deposed king a decade or so earlier. The lapses of judgement by the French leadership were mitigated by a willingness to dash out from safe harbors to take the fight to their believers. They were clever foes with a solid strategy at work, and their loss came about for the usual reasons of the time: the British Navy bottling up their home ports kept them on the logistical back foot the whole time, and even then Napoleon’s reinforcements came within a few weeks of prolonging the fight for another two years.
The British did what they do. They committed just enough forces to make it any even fight, then let go of the leash. At 3,000 miles and months of travel away from the nearest Admiralty office, they didn’t have much choice. This freedom of movement allowed British forces to quickly adapt, to correct mistakes and follow-up on successes, which combined with a willingness to take big risks and suffer terrible losses in pursuit of punishing their foe meant that they could win the war of attrition and shorten the conflict to their advantage.
The question that remains: how to wargame it? Seasonally, and with some slight randomness of events. We know what forces were where at the outset, but to keep us on our toes, we can let the dice decide which French raiders arrive when, within reason. Give the British an extra few weeks to prep, and the French an extra hulk of a prize to shepherd into port, and events can quickly take on a life of their own.
Let the French counter-raid the British toehold in the region, and maybe they can do enough damage to prevent big British and expensive raids on the Isle de France.
Shuffle the qualities of each ship’s captain and you may find either side more timid than they were in our world. That might prolong the conflict to French advantage, or give the British a much narrower margin of insurance in the final showdown.
There’s a lot of room to explore in this conflict, and even a by-the-numbers timeline and OOBs can spiral out of control thanks to the vagaries of the dice. Can’t wait to see how it plays out.