Early War German infantry support weapons

 I got rather excited by the 'new' WRG 1925-50 rules, so finally got around to finishing the company level early War German infantry support weapons I had in stock. I was planning on doing some 1941 games and I needed some early war kit. I also still have a vague hankering to put together some Charles Grant style 'Battle' armies at the 1:3 ratio he used, so obviously my early war rifle companies would need a light mortars and anti tank rifles. As I tend to normally do grand tactical WW2 games, I'd not bothered with doing the extra tactical bits and pieces for my 15mm early Germans. 

And here they are, a pair of German AT Rifles and a pair of 50mm mortars. These are all Plastic Soldier Company, from their Early War Heavy Weapons box. You actually get three of these in the box, but I'd already used one of each with my Afrika Korps figures.

The AT rifles require you to assemble the gunner (2 pieces) but not the loader. Somewhere I'd lost the instructions but I figured out which bits went where fairly easily as the way the figures are broken apart tends to be unique for each pose. 

The crew are in jackboots but with fairly light equipment. The loader just has his breadbag and water bottle, while the gunner also has an entrenching tool and bayonet. Both have clearly moulded pistol holsters. 

The 50mm mortars also have a single piece loader, two part gunner but also a single piece mortar. I glued to mortar to the gunners hands to make the whole thing a bit more stable. I think the mortar is actually supposed to be separate but I found a suitable angle to stick it on. 

Again, both crew have light equipment, just breadbags, water bottles and pistols.

I did all of them in Vallejo Field Grey over a light undercoat, picked out the details then pinwashed some areas and gave them a light drybrush to pick out the highlights. One of the 50mm mortars was in action minutes after I'd finished basing them. That is some sort of record! 

Ive not looked at the PSC website for a while now as I rarely have any need for bulk purchases of stuff, but I gather they are switching over to resin 3D prints and a lot of the old plastic ranges are OOP now. 

Helmet for my pillow

 At the Tapton CALF earlier this year I picked up a copy of "Helmet for my pillow" by Robert Leckie. Although the the TV series 'The Pacific' hadn't grabbed me as much as 'Band of Brothers', I knew this book was one of the ones used as a source so I thought it would be worth a look.

Leckie was a journalist by trade before he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the book. It was first published in 1957 and I've generally found the 1950s memoirs of war veterans, be they literal or lightly fictionalised (like Mailed Fist, Warriors for the Working Day or The Cruel Sea), to be excellent.

This is excellently written, a really good read, and very moving. In lots of ways it is similar to Philp Caputo's 'A Rumour of War' about the USMC experience, although the latter is about Vietnam. Leckie had an eventful war, enlisting in 1942 and being trained as an assistant machinegunner before being sent to Guadalcanal where he served through the entire campaign. He eventually ended up in the battalion intelligence section and also fought in the Bismarck Islands and at Peleilau watching his friends die one by one. Some of the incidents in the book made it into the TV series, albeit rather modified, and other bits are skipped altogether. I found the lengthy account of their leave time in Australia after Guadalcanal particularly compelling.

Anyway, highly recommended, and I guess it can be picked up very cheaply as it is such an old book now. All in all I found it much better than the TV adaptation. 

Bill Farquars Rules for Armoured Warfare 1925-50. Part 2. Attack on Senno

 So, next in the sequence of my playtests of the 'new' WRG 1925-50 set is another scenario from the 'Ghosts of Smolensk' scenario book. This time 7th Panzer Div has siezed a bridgehead over a river at the small town of Senno on the outskirts of Smolensk, and 7th Mechanised Corps has decided it wants it back.

This time there will be some tanks and AT guns in the mix. 

The base scenario is played on a small 3x4 table. I've stretched it to 3x5 to give the Russians a bit more room to set up. I was going to switch to 1mm = 1m, but given it is small table scenario anyway, I'll stick with 6"=100m.

Main features are the stream running N-S and the road running E-W, straddled by various buildings which make up Senno. There are a few boggy fields east of Senno, and boggy woodland. I'm treating this as impassable for vehicles. In the base scenario it is marshland, but the woods give the Russian infantry more of a chance. The hedges are high vegetation, they block LOS at ground level, otherwise there isn't a good deal of LOS blocking terrain here. The steam is passable but is a linear obstacle.

The Russians need to take and hold four buildings (ie all the buildings on the east side of the stream will do), and the Germans need to stop them.

The initial German force is a (dismounted) motorised infantry platoon supported by a 75mm LeIG towed by a halftrack. I've gone with a slightly different organisation for the Grenadiers than the last game, three squads each with an MG34 group and a rifle group, a rifle/cmd HQ with a manpack radio plus a 50mm mortar section and AT rifle group attached from company.

There is also a company command element with a Kubelwagen which includes a radio. 

Riding to the rescue is another motorised infantry platoon with the same TOE as the dismounted one, but with their transport. Whether they will be brave enough to drive their trucks into load of Russian tanks is another matter.

Attacking them are bits of 7th Mechanised Corps. Amazingly the Russians seem to have brought some infantry along with their tanks. The Russians have a platoon each of BT7 and T26s (although they are all supposed to be BTs, this is what I have). I've been generous and given them a company command T26 too. None of these vehicles have radios, and given the operational rate of 1941 Soviet pre-war armour, this lot is probably all that is left of an entire battalion. The BTs come on first, followed a few turns later by the T26s.

They also have two platoons of motorised infantry. The base scenario gives them trucks, but given the terrain, that is just suicide, so these guys are walking. Very few Motorised Regiments in 1941 had any trucks anyway. I've been a bit generous with these two, they each have an HQ and three squads with a rifle group and rifle/LMG group each. There is also a company commander on foot, plus a 50mm mortar section with two mortars. None of these guys have any radios either.

There is a fair amount of turf to cover for one platoon, but a 600m front should be quite doable given the open terrain. The platoon deploys in an inverse wedge with two squads up front (you can see 1 gruppe in the woods on the left and 2 gruppe in the fields in the foreground). The AT rifle is attached to 2 gruppe and both the AT rifle and MG34s can cover the open ground. The rifle groups are providing flank protection for the MGs. There are pre-arranged flare signals for each to group to pull back if required as they are miles from platoon HQ. 

The Luftwaffe has already spotted the Russian tanks, so the Germans know they need to lay out an AT defence.

3 gruppe and platoon HQ are hiding behind buildings in the town. Being inside buildings is a really bad idea as they can be acquired from miles away and the occupants then suppressed, or worse. Hiding behind them though gives bonuses against acquisition. In the last game the German halftrack was almost constantly suppressed by small arms fire which rendered it fairly useless, I'm hoping to do the same to the Russians in this game.

Company HQ is on the far side of the stream.

Over near the hedged stream is the 75mm infantry gun, again hiding behind a building. It has a decent field of fire across the open ground. Actually in the stream and behind the hedge is the 50mm mortar team, again with a wide field of fire. Fortunately the Russian tanks can't move through the woods, but the Russian infantry certainly can so we will see how this pans out.

My initial plan is to bring the reserve motorised platoon on here as they can debus safely behind the hedegrow, but I'll need to see how the Russian attack goes. 

The Russians don't have any radios so their attack is going to be entirely pre-planned. The two CC elements can intervene I guess but as neither company has any significant reserves, I'm not sure what they can usefully do.

The main thing I'm going to aim to do is keep the armour and infantry in step so they can support each other. The Russian tanks will suffer big reaction penalties if they end up in the buildings without support. So the tanks will just roll down the open ground in the middle towards the village, shooting at stuff as it appears. BTs on the left and T26s on the right (I rearranged them into the correct formation after this photo!).

I'm putting in the stronger infantry attack on the right. One platoon plus the CC and mortar section. There is more frontage to deploy here and a covered route via the hedges right up to the village. The mortars are going to set up in the tree line to provide covering fire. For now the infantry are advancing in squad columns, rifle groups at the front. 

The other platoon is on the left. As this section of woods is so narrow, they are just advancing on a two squad front. The playable area stops 12" from the left. They will push down the woods and clear the fields area before entering the village.

And off we go. The first wave of tanks keeps pace with the Russian infantry as they march through the woods, so everyone is rumbling forwards at 100m (6") per turn.

The distances are long and all the infantry are in cover so spotting them is very hard. The Russian tanks are pretty easy to see however and the German 50mm mortar, ATR, 75mm and the rifle and MG groups in the village easily acquire them.

An eagle eyed MG34 team in the northern woods spots some Russian infantry moving along the tree line on the opposite side of the clearing and guns them down. The reaction test results in the inevitable 'cautious advance' ie max half move, which I was going to do anyway.

The Russian infantry on the other side are shielded by the hedgerow and the woods are wider anyway so they press on quickly. The Russian 50mm mortars take up position along the woods line to fire across the clearing.

The BTs advance to within 100m of the German 2nd squad to force a morale check, and...disaster! Every single one is blown up! The ATR got one, it was fairly easy to score a hit at 150m range but it needed to roll a six to KO, which it duly did. The new penetration table gives the maximum range you can penetrate an armour class (250m for an ATR vs Class II) at which range you need a six, -1 for every 250m closer down to a minimum score required, which is still a six for an ATR as the rounds are so small and non lethal. So a roughly 10% chance of a kill, as the ATR can only fire once in a turn.  

The 75mm duly hit one BT, despite it being 550m away (needed a 4+ to hit with a 75L24, - 1 for first shot vs a acquired target to 5+). The penetration for 75L24 vs Class II armour is 2000m, so needed a 6-5, or 1+. So the tank brewed.

Stationary guns get to fire twice, and it duly acquired the last BT, scored another hit on 5 and up it went. The odds of that full sequence of rolls was around 1:120. 

I didn't want to screw up the playtest with a freak range of rolls, so I resolved it again. This time the 75mm killed one tank but amazingly the ATR managed to roll another six on its penetration roll. The dice gods had spoken and I let the result stand. The tanks duly failed their morale and got a big yellow badge of courage, but as they had completely failed to spot anything, just sat there and didn't withdraw.

The only bright spot for the Russians was that one of their 50mm mortars had spotted the ATR.

Over in the right, the Russian infantry shook out into skirmish line, being careful to stay more than 100m away from the Germans in the wood, while the 50mm mortar stonked the ATR, missing completely.

And on the left the Russian infantry also spread out and tried to spot the Germans lurking in the corn fields, but none managed it as none of the enemy had fired.

Despite surviving one round of fire, the last (stalled) BT was duly acquired, hit and destroyed by the 75mm gun on the following turn.

I took a break for the evening and had a long think. I seriously thought about packing it in after the tank disaster, as I couldn't imagine how exactly the same fate wouldn't occur to the T26s. But then I had a longer look at the provisions for suppressive fire, and realised that of course you don't actually need to see the enemy to fire at them....

Next morning I started up again. The next wave of Russian tanks rolled cautiously on. The Russian platoon near the fields sprayed the edge of the field with suppressive fire, which suppressed one of the German groups and they both pulled back into the field so they were no longer a permitted target.

The ATR had also ducked behind the barn to lose the 50mm mortar acquisition.

I must have missed a photo here - but basically the Russians stormed forward in the woods and bizarrely managed to suppress the German before they could fire back. The action sequence allows a rifle group to move forward and then fire 'on the move'. As they were now within grenade range, this was extremely lethal (hits kill on anything but a 1!) and both German groups were very lucky to escape with suppressions, and they fell back out of range. 

I can't actually think what I could have done to avoid this, possibly pulled back when the Germans fluffed their spotting rolls the previous turn. It is possible I made a mistake in measuring the distances for spotting, movement and firing. Something it is very easy for Mr Fat fingers to do, even with 15mm stuff. 

One bright light for the Germans was that their motorised platoon had arrived, and it has a nice covered position to debus in. The truck parked up behind the hedge to debus next turn.

Sadly in the fields, the Russians were close enough to spot the retreating German infantry and they were both cut down by MG fire as they moved through the corn. 

The Russian mortars meanwhile acquired the barn instead of the ATR hiding behind it and stonked it with suppressive fire - which caught the ATR in its beaten zone. Mmmm. Not so good for the Germans.

Sadly for the Germans retreating in the woods, units are allowed to fire (once) at them in their original positions, so the two leading Russian sections laid down a hail of MG fire and grenades, and cut them both down. The reserve section advanced over the corpses. 

The German infantry now debussed behind the hedge. The T26s had also discovered the suppressive fire trick, and concentrated all their fire on the building the 75mm was hiding behind. The gun was suppressed.The crew wheeled it away from the building as it was attracting fire.

The ATR engaged one of the T26s, hit it, but it bounced off. The Russian infantry were now filtering into the fields and the platoon CO managed to spot the firing ATR. The plan was to hand it off to the rest of the platoon next turn as a target.

The 2nd German platoon at least lined the stream/hedge and took up firing positions as the Russians in the woods began to fan out.

A bigger problem for the Germans was that having been wheeled into the open, the 75mm was no longer in cover. Three of the Russian tanks parked 500m away spotted the 75mm and blew it apart with several rounds of 45mm HE. Oh dear!

The Russians began advancing into the field and the ATR withdrew after being suppressed by massed fire from the enemy infantry. I can't see it escaping alive.

And firing broke out between the opposing platoons on the left.

At that point I called it. I can't see that the Germans have any answer to the massed suppressive fire that the Russians can generate with their armour. They can just pick a point and saturate it with fire, so a well earned Russian win, despite their earlier setback.

I felt much more on top of the spotting etc in that game, and I liked that way the armour-anti armour battle developed, but there is still an awful lot going on to generate a result. Modern games are much faster to produce similar effects. I also felt like I was playing the original WRG rules again, with all the drawbacks of those rules.   I don't mind playing the 'stack up the negative reaction test modifiers' game - you need to suppress the enemy and attack them to force them back which is fine. But I do mind the silly gamey things you can do with area fire, and the way there is absolutely no differentiation between sides apart from a couple of national modifiers to morale, in fact you are better off with Russian or Japanese troops due to their morale bonuses. I guess that was something the later set tried address with its unit modes etc.

So that was quite a good exercise, I ended up playing the game rather than wrestling with mechanisms, and it was enough to remind me why I stopped playing WRG in the early 80s in favour of other things, but it was an entertaining exercise in nostalgia and many thanks to John for making the effort to write and publish these. Despite my grumbles there are lots of positives in this set of rules: 

• The engagement ranges and the way engagements developed seemed far more in line with results from Operations Research than more abstract rules. 
• I really liked the new anti-tank tables and the way armour penetration is handled. 
• The new multi action moved/fire phases are also very clever indeed and work well, particularly differentiating between the way that vehicles and infantry operate.
• I actually felt like a company commander, writing (mental) orders, sorting out areas of responsibility, signals etc 

I guess the downside is that there are a  lot of mechanisms to get the end result, far fewer than Firefly or Cambrai to Sinai, but even so. The determinist spotting is integral to the way that combat works, so it can't be easily just taken out (effectively 'cover', barring proper protected positions, is factored into the acquisition roll, not the to hit roll) and it just results in so much dice rolling and stuff to remember. Too much for my old brain anyway.

I might, just might, go back and do an actual tank battle and see how that goes, but at the moment I think I'm a bit WRG'd out and I have some other things I need to do.

Bodged Barn Door

 Courtesy of Tims 'slightly used military equipment' Emporium I became the proud owner of this Pak 43. The Pak 43 was the final development of the 88mm gun into a dedicated anti-tank weapon, and its carriage and mount were so enormous, it was christened the 'Barn Door'. 

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of it in its original state, it was still in dark grey undercoat and with a somewhat longer barrel. I gather that originally it was a scratch build and supposed to be 1/76th scale but measuring it up it seemed more like 1/87th - probably the result of whatever was used for the donor gun.

It needed a little bit of light fettling. One of the feet had gone missing and I made a replacement, but the main thing was that the barrel was too long and it had an enormous oversized muzzle brake. I cut the barrel down to 1/100th scale and replaced the muzzle brake with one salvaged from a spare 105mm StuH barrel.

As it is a fairly large gun I tried to use fairly large gunner figures, I had a couple of spare Forged in Battle gunners who are rather 'heroic' in size and I added a spare PSC Russian gunner with his hands over his ears. Painted grey he looked fine alongside the other two. 

It is actually very hard to find photos of the gun in action on the cruciform mount with the shield (there are plenty of the alternate K18 mount with no shield) , but I found a couple of 88mm L71 Waffentrager photos with gun shields and the crew look about the right size.

I just painted it in standard late war three colour camo as that was the most common scheme. I used Desert Ochre as the base this time instead of Desert Sand I  think it looks more like some shades of Dunkelgelb. I didn't bother with a wash but I did give it a drybrush to pick out the highlights. Mercifully the cruciform mount is at roughly 45 degrees to the gun so although it needed a big base, it didn't need a ginormous base.

I real life the towed 88L71 wasn't very successful as it was so heavy to move, and many were simply abandoned on the battlefield after firing a few rounds. Hence the rush to get them onto SP mounts, Nashorns, Jagdpanthers etc. I'm struggling to imagine how it will get used, but I do have one scenario which features them as surprisingly 21st Panzer Div had a whole battalion of these, deployed northwest of Caen on D-Day.

 

Galleys R Us (Part 2)

 Pressing on with my paper galley fleets, and having worked out a basing scheme which seemed to be OK, I went ahead and based up a load more of the ships into roughly a 'green fleet' and a 'red fleet'.

And this is how everything ended up. I'm still not 100% convinced by the light blue bases, but it would be easy enough to paint them dark blue instead. I've got a big bit of the light blue card left which will do for a battle board for 3x3 type games anyway, so I'll leave them as they are for now.

So this is the 'Red Fleet'. I've added small wakes to all the ships using my Posca Paint Pens and added flags, prows and hull sides in a mix of red and yellow, with red being predominant. The yellows are in there for variety and so I can represent allied contingents. I've also labelled them as light (3/4 bank), medium (5/6/7 bank) and heavy (8/9/10 bank). I haven't bothered with individual numerical codes but it would be easy to add them.

There are also a couple of red flags off the original counter sheet, to represent admirals or whatever.

And this is the 'Green Fleet', actually a mix of green and white. Some of these ship counters have corvus (corvii?) printed on them so are presumably supposed to be vaguely Roman. Those 'green' flags look yellow to me!

I made up both sides identically, they have eight bases of light galleys, eight mediums and two heavies, although the specific types vary. Green Fleet tends towards heavier ships (4s instead of 3s, 6s instead of 4s etc). They are all on 40mm x 40mm bases and my original plan was to use them in pairs so I can represent lines and columns and possibly stack them for the wierd circular defensive formation.

These are the odds and sods. The original Red Fleet had loads of the little rowing boat things. I've no idea what they are supposed to be so I based a few of them in groups of three and labelled them as Very Light. There are also six merchantmen/transports which are just medium galleys with unfurled sails drawn on in a variety of colours. I stupidly labelled them as M, which of course is just the same as a Medium galley, so I had to rename them MM. I wish I'd picked T (for transport) instead!

The entire collection fits very neatly into a single business card box, with half a dozen spare counters and plenty of space left over. I've not even used half of the counters I printed off, so I can make up some more bases if I feel the need. I just need to actually play a game with them now, but they weren't an enormous amount of work to put together. 

Hilariously, having completed these, I have become distracted by other projects (I blame you, Bill Farquar), so 'Dominion of the Galley' will have to wait a bit while I fiddle around with WRG 1925-50 and work up Alexander the Brief. 

Sheffield CALF 2025 - One Hour Eylau

 After solo testing my One Hour Napoleonic version of the Eylau scenario in Bloody Big Napoleonic Battles, I thought it deserved a public outing at CALF 2025. It was scheduled late in the afternoon, so I only had four players, but that was fine.  Jerry and Tom took the French, while Chris K and Phil S took the Russians.

View(?) from the east. Apologies for the appalling photos, the light in this room was very poor and even the super camera on my new phone struggled.

Eylau is the town in the depression on the left, with around half the Grande Armee drawn up around it. The Russians under Bennigsen are on the other side of the valley on the right. The rest of the French army is arriving from the east (Davout) and the west (Ney), the latter is pursuing Lestocqs Prussians who are marching to the sound of the guns.

The battle is complicated by frequent snow storms blowing across the battlefield, although all the streams are frozen over. To win, either side must hold the majority of the towns and villages, the Russians currently hold three and the French just Eylau itself, so the onus of attack is on the French.

The Russian left is the obvious spot to attack as it is isolated from the main army, and Davouts Corps comes trudging on to attack it. Just visible on the left is Murats reserve cavalry Corps, also heading for the hill.

Along with attacking on his right, Napoleon, perhaps unwisely also pushes Soult into the valley on the left. The Russians outnumber the French 2:1 in this sector, and it will be quite some time before Ney arrives. Sensing an opportunity, Bennigsen (Phil) begins shuffling units around.

Back in the east, the weather clears, allowing Davout and the French reserve artillery to shoot Murat in, who overruns the Russian redoubts on the hill! This does leave them under a crossfire from the main Russian position, but it is very heroic.  

The Russian reserve cavalry swings around the French left flank, shot in by the Russian divisions on the heights. One Cavalry Corps falls back rather shot up (you can just see the heap of hit markers on it), but the other is neatly across the stream and ready to roll up the French flank.

The French have to fall back towards Eylau, and form a new line facing northwest.

Murats cavalry withdraw to deal with the new threat, leaving Davout to take the village on the hill. It is on the reverse slope so the French infantry can advance under full cover. 

The Russians keep up the pressure on the French left. They engage the French centre and start pushing infantry across the valley. The French line is looking more concentrated now, but their left flank is still hanging in the air. Murat is now in close support of the French infantry.

Davout is now trying to take the village, but villages are tough.

With Eylau firmly held, Soult extends his line back along the ridge line again. There is a major firefight in the centre.

Soults westernmmost units are very exposed and take a hammering from the Russian infantry divisions in the valley. Lestocq has now arrived and marches to join the main Russian army and garrison the right end of their line on the ridge.

The Russians keep pushing hard and gaps appear in the French line. Ney has now appeared, but it is too little, too late. Lestocq is in the village up on the ridge. 

The Russians overrun Soults battered infantry, despite the best efforts of the French cavalry.

View from the west. Ney is trying to take on the Prussians, but the main Russian army is now hard up against Eylau and things aren't looking too good for Napoleon. Davout still hasn't cleared the Russians out of the eastern village, and with the ratio of objectives still very firmly 3:1, we call it a well earned Russian victory.

That was a great game and very different to my solo replay. The Russians were very aggressive and took full advantage of their initial numerical superiority. The weather was also much better than in my solo playtest, and although there was considerable light snow which restricted visibility, there was only one blizzard and even a few clear weather turns, so unlike my solo game, there was plenty of scope for sweeping manouvre. I was probably a bit over cautious as the Russians in my solo game, but I think if I was playing this again, I'd use cards for the weather instead of dice to give an average result as it has such a big  impact on the flow of the game.

I used a very minimal set of the rules for this, stripping out the morale rules completely as they added extra complexity but had very little impact on the game. Units in fact retreated when it was sensible to do so of their own (or player) accord. One thing I did keep was rallying, and the players seemed quite happy to do that. As only half the hits are regained and the rest become permanent, it isn't game breaking, and it gives something for leaders to do if units are in a tight spot.