I plan on running a series of games with my buddy for the air war over Korea. I will have a scenario or two intended to capture each of the main periods of the war the evolving nature of the conflict. We'll see how it goes.
We will be using the Tumbling Dice 1/600 aircraft miniatures with Litko bases. The rules will be White Star/Red Star which can be found on the Wargame Vault.
Dateline: June 29th, 1950
Location: Suwon Airfield, Republic of Korea
On June 27th, an attack by the North Korean KPAF 1st Air Division on Suwon Airfield had been thwarted by F-90 Shooting Stars. Despite this loss, the KPAF returned to the attack on the 29th. This time, the American defenders were a group of F-51 Mustangs. US Military leaders were on hand at the nearby town as part of a conference. They were able to witness the defense of the base first hand.
These attacks led to Gen, MacArthur to authorize air sorties to attack North Korean targets in order to establish air superiority.
This will be a classic engagement from early in the war. I could not really find any information on the North Korean attackers, but knew that the objective was to attack ground targets and that the North Koreans were equipped with a lot of IL-10's. Those would be of little value in a CAP. Therefore, I decided to use more "fighter" oriented planes for this sortie.
Forces:
USAF
4 F-51 Mustangs with Experienced Pilots
North Koreans
2 Yak- 9 with Rookie Pilots
2 La-9 Fritz with Experienced Pilots
These miniatures are from the Tumbling Dice 1/600 range. Very affordable and they paint up nicely.
Mission:
A simple Combat Air Patrol.
Set-up:
1 MU will equal 1 inch and the board will be 48 by 48MU.
There is no difficult terrain on the board. However, there are 4 cloud banks. There are 3 cloud banks jumbled together at High altitude, and 1 smaller cloud bank at Combat altitude.
In this case, the USAF is the Attacker. The North Koreans are focused on getting to the air field to strafe targets. The Mustangs arriving lead to a dogfight instead.
Weather, sortie type, and Attacker were all determined using the methods found in the main White Star/Red Star rulebook.
If you are so inclined, you can read all about the battle on the Blood and Spectacles blog here:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2023/10/battle-report-white-starred-star-cap.html
I will post additional battle reports from this project here if there is interest in the project and the games. Thanks for looking!