The penultimate battle in this campaign, Battle 15, was another attempt by the Germans to snuff out a Polish escape - here a bridgehead position held at the edge of a town. As is something of a running theme, the Germans are aggressively using reconnaissance elements to carry out assaults. Given information that the Poles have armoured vehicles in this bridgehead then the Germans are at least supported by an anti-tank gun.
The Forces
Kampfgruppe Heller:
Company Command element
Motorcycle platoon
Sd231
Two attached engineer squads
37mm anti-tank gun and tow
The Polish Forces:
Company Command element
Two rifle platoons
MMG
Wz.29 armoured car
7TP
I followed the very aggressive orders and tactics prevalent in the original game. This had certain interesting consequences...
The Set-Up:
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| The Polish troops are mainly around the buildings, with the centre of resistance at top-left, but with elements to the left, centre and top-right too. |
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| The Germans advance, coming from the bottom-right |
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| The Polish MMG in the building bottom-left (for initial clarity, I leave the actual troops adjacent and then remove them from the table, or insert them if possible, once the game starts). |
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| Polish infantry in the ruined building by the junction (near ground), with the force commander and the balance of the two platoons by the buildings and the walls in the town. The armoured car can just be seen top-left. |
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| The main Polish line, including the armoured car (bottom-left), company and platoon commands (centre-left) and the 7TP (top); you can just pick out some infantry in or near each of the woods, too. |
The Battle:
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| The action begins quite rapidly: Polish MG fire (from the MMG I picked out above) forces the last m/c section to pull back into cover, the remainder of the platoon have advanced... |
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| ...and are approaching the crossroads. |
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| When they were mown down by the rifleman, and particularly the BAR gunner, in the ruined building! |
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| The Sd231 commander cheers himself up by pumping round after round into the ruin - the Polish squad gets its collective head right down into the rubble |
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| The German commander rapdily recasts the strategy, moving the Engineers and anti-tank gun off to the flank; the surviving motorcyclists (from the rear section) provide some protection |
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| Note that more Polish infantry is trickling forward to help out around the ruin |
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| The 7Tp trundles forward from the top and discomfits the leading German Engineer squad |
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| The Polish infantry are being supported by an ATR now too. Or at least 'supported', its gunners are not making much of an impact on the Sd231 |
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| A weird kind of stasis has affected the battlefield, with all the elements in contact (Polish infantry and German armoured car; Polish tank and German anti-tank gun and engineers) resolutely failing to hit each other, but resolutely holding onto their positions! Quite a lot of time passed like this, without anything very much happening... |
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| The stand-off is resolved by more Polish troops arriving; at that point the German commander orders a withdrawal - vastly outnumbered and without artillery support, there does not seem any very obvious routes to victory. |
Game Notes:
A very interesting game, which is probably the biggest demonstration of the different implications of using the rules I am using for this, versus the rules that Jack originally used. Victory for the Germans was always a fairly doubtful proposition in this one, but rapidly became almost impossible. Small arms fire is rarely decisive against troops in cover here - but OTOH, it can be decisive, occasionally extremely decisive, if you catch troops moving in the open, which is what happened early on. I have a small rules' query I need to iron out with John, not so much about the fire, but about the lead up to it, that might have made a difference to the game - not to the result, but that the Germans might have been stopped with fewer losses.
The triumvirate of Polish tank - German anti-tank gun - German engineers was quite interesting. The Polish tank gun was a bit too small to be very effective against foot troops. It could have advanced to try and get a panic result, but the German engineers, although disrupted, refused to quite. The German anti-tank gun was equally a bit too far away to get an easy hit on the Polish tank! So the Polish tank resorted to machine-gunning the engineers, which was obviously causing a couple of casualties but mainly just cusing the Germans to wiggle further and further down into the dirt. Eventually, the 7TP pulled back, feeling that the balance of chance was probably marginally against it.
Anyway, more good fun. Buildings a mixture of Battlescale and Leven, models a mixture of H&R, Scotia and Baccus.
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