In recent REVIEW's, I've spoken of a WW II campaign in which I'm engaged, via the e-mail, with Don Bailey. As Allied commander, my task was to break through Don's German lines using one or more of three possible routes. Don's goal was to distribute his troops to ensure that, no matter which route I took, he'd have enough units available to stop my advance. All of our battles use 20mm troops.
I was successful for the first couple of battles, but both the Germans and the Allies suffered severely. My forces were so mauled that I didn't really have enough 'oomph' to continue the campaign... it appeared that unless I could win one final decisive victory, all would be over.
The place of the final battle was at the town of Rendal. Here, the defending Germans held a river line, crossed by three bridges. My objective was the bridges. Without them, my advance was halted.
Fred Haub stepped in for Don and commanded the defenders. As part of his force, he had 3 stands of German Engineers, and he placed one of them at each of the bridges, ready to trigger a series of charges if the battle appeared to be lost. We discussed how to represent the charges going off... one possibility was to toss dice... a good toss, and BOOM!, there went a bridge... a bad toss, and the charges failed to explode.
This didn't quite make sense to me. The reason was that the German defenders had had about a week before the battle (in the time scale of the campaign) to prepare laying out their explosives, testing them, running wires, running more wires, more testing, etc., before the Allied attack began. One would think that one push of the button, and this overly tested system, built with German precision, would perform on command.
So we set aside the dice tossing routine. Instead, prior to the advance of my units, I parachuted in 3 stands of determined, granite-jawed troops, whose objective it was to gain control of the bridges.
We defined each stand as a company... hence my 3-company paratroopers constituted a small battalion, as did the 3 stands of German Engineers.
I chose to ignore the central bridge, and try to land 1 company at the western bridge, and 2 companies at the eastern end. For each company, I pointed to a specific location at which I wanted a company to land, and tossed two 10-sided dice, one white, one red. If the red was higher, the company would land the red die value (in inches) to the east. If the white was higher, the company would land the white die value to the west.
We did the same for the north-south axis. Of my three companies, two dropped in the open... while only one landed anywhere near its desired target. But all came under fire, and all were held down and couldn't help the Allied cause.
In the beginning phases of the battle, just before the paratroopers landed, I sent my 20mm tracked recon units down the road to Rendal.
The intent was to draw enemy fire, hoping to expose as many German defending units as possible prior to the appearance of my main force. If the recon vehicles passed within 20 inches of a site, there was a 40 percent chance that any Germans that Fred had placed there would fire.
The function of the recon vehicles was solely to draw fire and expose defending units... the vehicles couldn't fire back, which seems a wee bit silly, but this prevented the game from deteriorating into a narrowly-focused vehicle-versus-vehicle combat, with the entire game being held up while the recon units actually fought their way through the German lines. And so, down the road went my recon units... and it turned out that after a couple of dice tosses, one defending German unit, a 3-stand tank battalion (each tank-token is a platoon), couldn't hold its fire, and popped away at the vehicles.
I've used the 40 percent 'open fire' factor before, and in past games, as the recon units whizzed up the road toward enemy lines, lots of enemy units, opened fire, inundating the vehicles with smoke puffs, i.e., hits. Five hits knocks off a vehicle, and many times, the recon units never live to tell the tale. Here, however, despite being continually shot at by the exposed tank battalion, only 2 hits were registered on the units, and they returned to base, and the men congratulated themselves on surviving.
Each 3-token battalion on the field was given a data sheet:
| POH and MORALE | SURVIVABILITY | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 80 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 75 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 70 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Note there are 18 'Survivability' boxes to be crossed out before a 3-stand unit is completely destroyed. Each time a single row of 6 boxes is crossed off, one stand of the unit is removed from the field.
The sheet also shows another column on the left termed 'POH & MORALE'. POH stands for 'probability of hit'... it's the basic percentage chance that, when the battalion fires, the target is hit. And MORALE, of course, is the probability that the unit holds position when it incurs damage.
The basic POH appears high, but there are several modifiers to lower it... deduct from the percentage when the target is in cover, or when a light gun fires on a heavier unit, etc. There's another huge negative modifier if all the stands in a battalion do not fire at the same target, i.e., split fire. I wanted to encourage 'volley fire' for an entire battalion at a single target. The units within the battalion can choose to fire at separate targets, but they're penalized for doing so.
It may also seem that 18 boxes is a fairly high number of hits to be incurred before a unit disappears, but there are several phases within the half-bound wherein the forces strike at one another. If the hit-dice percentage toss is below half the POH, the target takes 2 hits, other wise a single hit.
Looking at the various possibilities for a unit to be scored upon, i.e., to lose boxes, we see:
- a. The active side gets 'opportunity fire' from several of its units just after it moves all troops
b. The non-active side has its own fire phase, wherein in it fires all it units
c. There's an artillery phase within each half-bound. One side or the other will get 2 artillery 'stonks' from off-board artillery... one at a 60 percent probability of success, the other at 50 percent.
d. There's an airstrike phase within the half-bound. Aircraft are basically expendable. Here, as the aircraft zips across the field, enemy anti-aircraft units fire at it. 5 hits destroys the aircraft, which tries to distribute its bombload before being shot out of the skies.
e. And every time a unit is hit, it refers to its MORALE factor, tests by tossing percentage dice under the factor, and if it fails, it falls back, and loses a box or two.
The above five sources of potentially losing boxes within the half-bound cause the 18 hit boxes to disappear at a reasonable rate.
Fred Haub's Germans at the town of Rendal consisted of 2 infantry battalions plus 2 tank battalions. One of the infantry units was split up... this was the engineers battalion, whose 3 companies were placed one at each bridge.
To supplement his regular forces, Fred had what I call 'pop-up' anti-tank guns, three of them. During any of his firing phases, one of the 'pop-up' guns could appear wherever wanted by the German commander, and fire... initially, they were very mobile units, indeed. But once in place, they remained in place. The guns proved to be extremely annoying to the Allies, but the 'pop up' guns were also extremely vulnerable. They had no data sheet... one hit and the single stand unit was destroyed. They essentially served two purposes;
- a. First, to provide additional defensive anti-tank fire power.
b. Second, to draw off Allied fire power from the main German units.
Note, therefore, that in addition to the stated orders of battle we had kept for the campaign, the rules provided for additional 'gratis' units:
- a. Off-board artillery strikes
b. Airstrikes
c. Recon units
d. 'Pop up' anti-tank guns
e. Anti-aircraft weapons. These were devoted solely to the A/A effort. Each side was given about 3 A/A guns and could place them on the field as desired.
Fred Haub's outnumbered Germans fought extremely well. Hampered by the fact that my paratroopers started off poorly, the rest of my attacking battalions did no better. I'd advance a battalion, it would take a hit or two, it would test morale, my dice throw would be a failing one, and the unit would fall back.
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© Copyright 1998 Wally Simon
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