Airborne Assault on Crete with NQM

 In a precursor to his Front Scale NQM game planned for Partisan, Chris had arranged to run a Corps Scale game of the invasion of Crete at Patriot Games in Sheffield. The event was organised by Tom, an occasional attendee at our evening remote games and Friday f2f sessions at Tapton.

I first went to Patriot Games when it opened in a small shop in the town centre, but now it has much grander premises nearer the ring road in Sheffield in an old factory building with a large shop, cafe and huge games area with dozens of tables. 

Chris getting ready to run the game and had just happened' to bring down a box full of NQM rules for sale! Patriot Games do a game mat printing service, and they'd printed three custom mats for this game, gridded out in 10cm hexes.

Initially we had three British players (I was cast as Freyberg and overall CO) and just two German. They were joined by two more Germans in the course of the morning.

Chris gave an initial briefing on how the rules work as I was the only one who had played them before. This is the view looking north from Crete, you can see the coastline on the custom game mat. The Aegean is in the mid ground and 'Greece' is way over there stacked with boxes of Germans. As this is a high level operational game, the hexes represent 6km of ground.

The game at Partisan will mainly focus on the German efforts to capture the airfield, so our job as the British was to provide an active defence. As historically, the defence was divided in two, West and East, a mixture of New Zealand, Australian and Greek troops in the main.

While the Germans looked in boxes we set out guys up. The various brigades had pre-designated starting areas with some flexibility - our guys were clustered around Heraklion (nearest the camera), Retimo (centre near the long river) and Maleme in the north. I put my Corps HQ in Suda (at the north end of the shorter river). The critical terrain features are obviously the towns and nearby airfields, and the single coast road crossing several bridges. There is also one road across the island to a small port on the southern coast. 

As CO I was responsible for the general scheme of defence, but also running the airforce and navy. With Admiral Cunninghams hat on, I had HMS Warspite and four cruisers to play with. There was also a notional destroyer flotilla near to Crete.

The RAF had three wings of fighters (Hurricanes) and two of Bombers (Wellingtons) which I distributed among the airfields.

Although we had lots and lots of ground units, many were very weak with only one or two strength points. We also had little artillery, all the available AA was concentrated in the east, we had two decent artillery units split between east and west and one coastal battery with 1SP(!). We had some logistic units but they had an enormous front to cover.

I had quite a lot to do in the game as I was acting as a player-umpire and helping the newer players with the rules, so I didn't take as many pictures as usual.

The Germans had this rather lovely Dorner flying boat to rescue people floating in the sea.

One of my first jobs as CO ws to decide what to do with the RAF, and based on my experience in Greece, I decided to pull them back to Egypt. Good job too as the opening attack had waves of German bombers blasting the airfields, a pasting from which little would have survived and left the runways cratered. The planes could operate from Egypt, but it was at the far end of the fighters endurance, so would be somewhat random.

In the west the German put down a couple of regiments quite far inland by parachute and glider as they were anxious about landing on top of troop concentrations or dropping in the sea. They got down quite well and began marching northwards. The big explosion is them coming into range of the 25pdrs east of Maleme. The defenders here had plenty of time to reorient themselves to the threat and get dug in facing inland.

In the east the next wave of Germans landed south of Heraklion. They didnt do so well and strayed a bit close to the British AA which duly shot an entire battalion out of the sky. The Germans put down about a Regiment here. The force ratios are more favourable to the Allies here.

The Germans attacked Heraklion quite aggressively, which looks like a doomed effort in this photo, but of course it doesn't show the fleets of German bombers and strafing fighters which hammered the defenders. Even so, the British (well, Greek and Australian) forces managed to put in a brigade sized counterattack which pushed the German back. Supported by the nearby Corps heavy artillery, it also saw an FJ battalion overrun.

The Germans obviously fancied their chances more at Maleme as that is where their third wave landed, including FJ artillery, assault engineers and logistic units. Covered by the Luftwaffe (who have flown home in this photo), the formed up and massed south of Maleme. 

They were soon to be joined by what was left of the seaborne invasion fleet! In a 'battleships' style mini game, 5th Gebirgsjager Division was mounted on ships and sailed across the eastern Med at night, while I (as Cunningham) tried to stop them. HMS Dido found one convoy and blew it out of the water, Warspite found another and it fled in terror back to Greece while a third slipped past the cruiser screen and made it to Maleme. The RAF bombed it as the sun rose, but the Luftwaffe returned the favour and Dido was heavily damaged.

At Heraklion the surviving FJ were forced back well into the interior by the counterattack. They were reduced to their regimental and divisional HQ, but found this very convenient demolished monastery on the top of a hill to hide in. Must write that idea down for future reference...

At Maleme the Gebirgsjager stormed ashore, and with heavy Luftwaffe support just managed to take the airfield! The players were now discovering the value of fresh units when attacking battered ones (every hit  knocks 1 off the advance/retreat roll).

In the east the Germans had noticed that Retimo and Heraklion were only held by AA units, so their transports were ordered to crash land on the cratered runways. At Retimo this worked well and the a couple of battalions landed successfully under the guns of the nearby Bofors regiment.

At Heraklion it ended in disaster however as a combination of AA and RAF fighters operating from Egypt saw one battalion shot down and sent the other transports packing.

At Maleme however, the well organised FJ now pushed northwards to the coast. Despite being heavily outnumbered, their superior quality and massive (Luftwaffe) fire support swept all before them and Allied units now began to surrender as they were overrun. A battalion of brave New Zealanders managed to hold the road south, but the Germans cut the road west to Maleme. Once their engineers had cleared the runway, the Germans would be able to fly reinforcements in directly, and the battered Allied units weren't in a position to counterattack against the fresh FJ and Gebirgsjager units.

Freyburg ordered a general retreat and evacuation at that point, to save as many men and as much equipment as possible. That was pretty much where the retreat was ordered in the real campaign too, but the unfortunate Australians never got the order and were left to fight it out on the east end of the island.

That was an excellent game, very enjoyable, and hugely ambitious with the combined air, land and naval aspects. After a while the players got the hang of the movement and combat mechanisms although we were very much playing a somewhat cut down version of the rules as written. The big 'cockpit' around Maleme did slow down a bit at one point, but we were resolving four or five separate combats at a time, and in the main it all rattled along well.

The game at Partisan was planned  to use brigade stands instead of battalion ones, but even so aimed to cover the whole campaign over the course of the day, rather like the Longstop Hill game. I covered it briefly in my recent Partisan report.