Making Sure of Savelborn

 Tim put on another 54mm Bulge game using his Funny Little World Wars rules. This time we are off to a hasty counterattack mounted by 9th Armored Division on 18th December 1944  near the town of Savelborn.

Area of Operations. Units from 276 Volksgrenadier Division have occupied Savelborn (centre). TF Hall and TF Philbeck, CCA, 9th Armored Div are counterttacking. The hills are all wooded and bad going.

I commanded TF Philbeck, Graham TF Hall and our CO was Jim. The wicked Germans were Micheal and John. TF Hall was approaching from the south and TF Philbeck from the east. My chaps had a recce troop, Armored Infantry Company and a couple of Sherman platoons. Graham had an engineer company, platoon of Stuarts and two 105mm batteries in support.

Battlefield from the south. I hope those cards aren't anything nasty! The general plan was for Graham to pin the enemy frontally while my guys went right flanking via the woods north of the town and cleared it from the rear.

The leading elements of TF Hall. The Engineer company has a rather beautiful Corgi diecast M3 halftrack to ride in.

M8s from TF Philbeck. These are both Solido models, tweaked by Tim.

German reinforcements start marching on from the north. The Hetzer is another stunning diecast model, the gun even elevates and depresses. I can't recall the manufacturer.

Grahams engineers debussed in the open in front of the town. Maybe not the best idea. The rest of the column tried to go cross country along the edge of the woods as they sorted themselves out. Personally I would have led with the armour in the open country here, but they aren't my guys.

The Germans in the woods are revealed! MG platoons, Panzerschreck teams and a rifle company. My guys are dimly visible in the distance. We lost some Shermans to Panzerschreck fire so I pulled the tanks back. The rest of the column is bypassing to the north as per the plan.

The German reinforcements apparently amount to an entire battalion, supported by a platoon of Hetzers. They are certainly a pretty big column anyway. 

Grahams guys in the open are pinned and shredded by massed MG42 fire. Fortunately the US artillery also plasters the German positions.

A bit hard to see but my M8 crews have dismounted and have taken the position on the ridge, the Armored Infantry are coming up behind them. I've left the Shermans down on the road to duel with the Hezter, which dashed ahead and appeared at the crossroads. The Germans have evacuated the wood having suffered heavy losses and the remnants are lurking behind that big wooden building. 

We broke for the night at that point, everything to play for!

The activation cards fell in my favour and I decided that Fortune Favours the Brave, so my Recce teams piled into the village and occupied the big wooden house and forestalled the VG marching down the road. My Armored Infantry also dismounted and fanned out through the trees.

Grahams battered Engineers (now reduced to platoon strength) finally struggled into the woods where they stopped. The German MG position up on the hill had decimated them.

Half the Germans on the road deployed into the woods to counter my infantry, and the other half assaulted my building from the line of march. The attack failed (I'm not wildly surprised, the 267 VG Div was rated as one of the worst in the German Army) and the road was left scattered with German casualties.

Elsewhere things weren't going to so well. Grahams Stuarts were still manouvering through the snowy woods, having not fired a shot all game, and the Hetzer managed to knock out all the Shermans! The German gunnery was very good, and mine was appalling. What a disaster.

The Germans had pulled back from the edge of the woods to avoid the US artillery which now belatedly started shelling the German positions on the hill. My Armored Infantry company now faced two companies of Volksgrenadiers supported by SFMG42 platoons... to add insult to injury, German AT teams knocked out the halftracks.

In danger of being completely wiped out my TF commander and medic picked up the wounded US infantry and pulled out of the woods back down the hill, the M8s acting as improvised ambulances. My Recce guys still had an escape route open, so with a parting shot managed to knock out the Hetzers with Bazookas (the Germans were ignoring them for some reason) and then legged it back through the woods to link up with the rest of the TF.

The 9th Armored attack had failed utterly.

Well we made a right balls up of that. I let my armour get too close to the German infantry (despite planning not to), and Graham, dismounted in the open far too early before our artillery had worked the Germans over and didn't get his armour into action at all. We thoroughly deserved to lose. Well done Germans for giving us a good kicking.

Tims 'worms eye view' of the game is always very atmospheric and produces a real fog-of-war. It isn't something I cannot replicate with my setup of a laptop on a pile of boxes.