He chose the Mairy scenario from the rule book which pits a Regular German force against some defending Regular Yanks.
The Krauts are forced to enter on only three points on table edge (two roads and a section of wooded ridge, the roads are kindly lined by 'bocage' equivalent foliage) with 4 Platoons of Grenadiers in Sd251 (I declined to use these) 4 x Panthers and some support in form of 81mm Mortars.
They have one less HQ than normal to simulate some historical command difficulties.
The Ami have 2 x 76mm and 1 x 57mm ATGs with an M10 and 4 (?) Platoons of GIs all setting up hidden (with one in Ambush) in the town and surrounding area.
They have a single stonk of off-board Artillery in General Support.
This of course means the Krauts will generally stumble into enemy fire before seeing anything to shoot at.
In our game I put my Stubble Hoppers (for you Sven Hassel fans) on foot as thought it too risky in the Hanomags.
On my left the Ami called in their Artillery as the first of the foot appeared.
Stephen of course duly rolled a double 6 for effect causing me to lose a full Platoon Dispersed in one fell swoop !
I decided to bring the Panthers on through the wooded ridge.
This entailed a risk of bogging/breakdown.
Two came through unscathed one was halted for a turn and the unlucky fourth suffered a Damage result.
On my right I brought on more foot sloggers who inevitably got shot up as well.
The Panthers were engaged by a 76mm from Ambush (meaning they could not observe it to fire back) for several turns.
These Panzerwaffe also failed to activate for several turns (5 out of the 12 turns played !!) meaning my thrust through the middle was largely ineffectual.
This meant brunt of assault was borne by the Soldaten whose losses mounted despite killing a few Ami (I had a lucky double 6 roll with my Mortars on a built up area).
I did manage to detach one Panther which engaged the M10 on my right brew it in short order.
It became apparent around turn 10 that I had insufficient numbers of Grenadiers left to take the town of Mairy (a 3 section area of which Germans were required to capture 2 sections).
The Panthers whilst proving pretty tough to deal with when standing off where not capable to digging out the Ami Infantry in the buildings.
So we called the game on turn 12 of the 14 scheduled).
Great stuff again with this excellent set of rules.
Grenadiers about to die under Artillery Bombardment on left road
No comments:
Post a Comment