Invasion of Denmark and Norway, April/May 1940

 Time for the next "Unconditional Surrender" training scenario, the invasion of Denmark and Norway in spring 1940. This scenario mainly introduces seaborne invasions, para drops and the effect of weather. Unlike Poland 1939, we also have a whole two turns to play!

I have to confess that as a game covering the invasion of Norway, I was a bit disappointed to find that the map only covers the bottom part of the country. This is very much a training scenario and not much of a two player game. At least in the Poland scenario you could experiment with different Polish deployments. Anyway, I digress.

The Germans have two turns (April, May) to conquer both Denmark and Norway. The former by occupying any Danish city, the latter by occupying Oslo. The normal National Will/country collapse rules are not used. The complication being that Norway has a large amount of water between it and Germany, while the weather is very likely to be bad, which has a major impact on military operations. 

The Germans have two armies, 1st and 10th, located around Kiel. In support that also have 1 Luftflotte which is already carrying two sorties. They also have a pair of special counters, a paradrop and a 'surprise attack' which personally I think should be called 'prepared attack; but that is what the game calls it. 

Paradrops can only be placed within three hexes of a friendly air unit, so to drop paras in Norway, we are going to need to take Aalborg at the top of Denmark on turn 1 and stage Luftflotte 1 up there.

The defenders are pre placed. One Danish Army in the peninsular which blocks the rail line and puts a ZOC across the German line of advance. The Norweigans have two armies, one in Oslo and one next to it. All these are armies are reduced strength garrison units, so only have one step, and also have -2 combat modifiers. 

The main complication for the Germans is the weather. If it is poor or severe, units cant conduct mobile attacks, just assaults, which essentially means one attack per turn. There are also negative combat modifiers attacking in bad weather AND air units are penalised. In April 1940, there is only a 1:6 chance of good weather, and the weather is duly rolled up as 'poor'. 

To attack Denmark, I could opt to use my paradrop to take Copenhagen or Aalborg. They have a 50:50 chance of taking an unoccupied city. Or I could drop it on the Danish Army, which gives a hefty combat bonus. If I use it now though, it wont be available to attack Norway.

Similarly, I could use my 'surprise attack' marker to conduct an amphibious invasion of Copenhagen or Aalborg as 10th Army is loaded up in Kiel ready to invade. However if I do that, again it will be unavailable to attack Norway. I cant just sail to an unoccupied port in Norway using naval transport as you can only unload in a friendly port, and Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim are distinctly unfriendly. I cant paradrop onto one of them first either as my air is too far away.

So, the Germans play it safe and just attack Denmark with infantry and airpower. The poor weather doesn't impact movement, but it imposes an extra MP cost to attack a hex and has various negative combat modifiers to both ground and air power. The main thing is that you cannot conduct mobile (ie multiple) attacks in bad weather, you are restricted to a single 'assault' attack which ends your turn when resolved. 

1st Army crosses the border and assaults the Danes with air support from Luftflotte 1.

This isn't like Poland where the Germans accrue huge combat bonuses! Even with the low quality of the Danes and air support, it ends up as +4. A big dice roll is enough for a DD result and the Danes are removed.  A DR result would be OK as they'd have to retreat towards Copenhagen, which would allow 10th Army to (just) slip around the west and enter Alborg to be in position to attack Norway in May. A failed attack would be a disaster though, as it would mean an unsupported naval invasion of Oslo.

1st Army occupies the empty hex and ends it turns. 10th Army takes Aalborg and the air unit stages up there (using up another sortie). With Aalborg occupied, Denmark surrenders and Copenhagen becomes German controlled. There isn't much the Norwegians can do, but I move their second Army east of Oslo as that green hex is also invadeable.

So, in May I roll poor weather again (50:50 chance of fine), but go ahead anyway. The Para Drop goes on Oslo, which will give a combat bonus and then the 'surprise' attack goes on Oslo too, which is resolved immediately. I can invade either Oslo itself or an adjacent hex, but it seems pretty obvious to go straight for the city as I will have to assault it given the weather. 

10th Army is the only unit starting on a port (you cant move and then invade), so off it goes with a big red assault marker. I put in Luftflotte 1 as well, which negates the city defence bonus. I'd completely forgotten to reset the number of sorties at the end of last turn too, but that doesn't matter as we are only making one attack here. I'd also completely forgotten the Allies have two 'ground support' markers, but this seems a good point to throw them into combat. That negates the paradrop combat bonus.

The Germans just scrape a DR result and manage to crawl ashore.

Now by rights Norway surrenders at this point (you can see what I mean about it not being a very interesting scenario for the Allied player!) but I thought it would be fun to mount a counterattack. An interesting feature of assault combat is that you can combine multiple units, which gives extra combat bonuses (+1 per unit). Anyway, the Norwegians went in but attacking a city in poor weather with garrison troops against 1940 Germans went as well as could be expected.

I made more mistakes than I mentioned in the narrative, so tried it again. This one is a lot faster to play than Poland 1939 as there are so few units.

Poor weather again in April 1940 (fair weather on a 1 only, severe weather on a 6! - you really don't want severe weather).  The Danes put in one ground support unit as this is a bit of an iffy combat for the Germans, but once again the Germans managed to roll a +2 differential, which combined with their other bonuses was enough to win.

And once again we are set up to invade Norway in May 1940. I wonder if it is possible to attack Oslo in April 1940? Hmm, fair weather might allow a mobile attack to take Aalborg with just 1st Army, then stage the air and go for it with 10th Army in Kiel?

Anyway, such dreaming aside, in goes the combined para/amphibious assault on Oslo in May 1940.

And a huge dice roll obliterates the defenders anyway.

I went through all the various modifiers and this is what the Allies would need to defeat the attack (ie avoid a DR result). If they had both ground support units, it would need to be a +2 differential, so definitely not a sure thing for the Germans, but still a fairly likely victory.

That was actually a good learning experience as I got my head around some of the more arcane aspects of the rules covering Paras and seapower,  but clearly important ones for operations in Europe, particularly the invasions of Italy, France and North Africa! It was only the following day that I realised I'd forgotten to reset the air power markers.

The next scenario in the series is France 1940, which is an altogether more serious affair. Interestingly the game also includes a 'France 1941' scenario where the French have rearmed - rather like the alternate OOB games in AHGCs 'France 1940'. Anyway, I'll stick to 1940 France as there is plenty going on in that one.

Scratch One Flat-top!

 Mark was hoping to run Worthington games solo effort 'Scratch One Flat top", a game covering Pacific carrier battles, at this years Virtual Conference of Wargamers (VCOW) back in February. Obviously it is a single player game but we've played loads of these as teams and he wanted to try it out beforehand. The Tuesday/Wednesday regulars all pitched up and we gave it a shot.

The playing area and ship reference cards. This is very similar to the Hunt the Bismarck game with large sea areas subdivided into four, ships have flotation points and the option to burn fuel for extra speed. The main difference with the Bismarck game is that the US player commands two carrier Task Forces, Lexington and Yorktown, each with fighter and bomber groups and an assumed surface escort.

Fairly obviously this the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese are trying to invade Port Moresby with their invasion fleet following the track of white dots from Rabaul down to Moresby and the US have to stop them. Somewhere out there are Japanese carriers, whose actions are run by the game system as it is a solo game.

Normally we'd do this sort of thing on Powerpoint, but Mark had run out of time so for Tuesday we prototyped it with a jpg image of the board and updated it using MS Paint.

The CRT. Carrier groups can allocate fighters to CAP and to bomber escort. Bombers just attack things, there are separate CRTs for both and give an idea of the optimum force levels to allocate. The P results are planes lost, and S results are hits on ships. The ship cards show how many fighters and bombers each carrier has remaining. Like the Bismarck game, combat is very abstracted and the fixed rather than proportional nature of the CRT means you are much better off doing big strikes than little ones.

A downside of using MS Paint as a collaboration tool is that it ends up tiny on the shared screen in Zoom. I projected a copy of the map onto my big second screen to keep track of things. We were all US players, I was allocated the role of Admiral and each TF had a Captain and an air group commander.

We set off westwards with the two TFs in adjacent large squares. each carrier can search one adjacent large square, rather oddly this has to be orthogonal.

You can see the TF tracks on the image above after a few turns. Lexington is blue and Yorktown is gold. The Japanese fleet is tracking along its course marked by red blobs, and the big red blob next to Yorktown is a Japanese carrier group! Shokaku and a light carrier (Shohu?).

A carrier battle duly followed which was quite good fun, but annoyingly Lexington couldn't join in as although it was adjacent, it wasn't orthogonally adjacent. That seemed a bit silly to me. Anyway, we came out top, Shokaku was badly damaged and Shohu went down although poor old Yorktown took quite a hammering. Lexington manouvered to try and catch Shokaku, but it slipped away westwards.

We decided to call it a night at that point to have a washup session. In the AAR it turned out that another Japanese fleet carrier had sailed right past us! We had a good discussion about how to better run the game as a remote team game, and the following evening planned to try it with Discord and parallel presentations using Powerpoint and ConceptBoard to handle the unit display. Sadly I wasn't able to make it but I gather it went well.

tbh although I like the concept of the game, I wont be rushing out to buy it as it just seems too abstract to be a decent simulation of carrier warfare (and this from someone who likes Dominion of...) but it is a good way to pass an evening. I like team based decision games, but I could do with slightly fewer unruly Captains!

Field of dreams

 As with reconnaissance, time spent on terrain is rarely wasted. I 'needed' to make an airfield for an upcoming game, and thought I may as well do some other fields while I was at it.

My template for the airfield was this one I already have, courtesy of the seemingly limitless collection of stuff Tim has. In larger operational games it is nice to have an admin hub for the air assets, and something like this works rather well as a holding zone for planes and you can move them around to simulate the various stages of refuelling and re-arming.

First step was chopping up some 2mm MDF. I am always careful handling this stuff and do the cutting up and sanding down outside and up wind to avoid the carcinogenic dust.

The airfield is 8" x 8" and as I was cutting up the MDF anyway, I made some field templates 6" deep and between 5.5" and 2.5" wide based on my existing fields. The wierd dimensions accommodate my 6" hedge and wall sections to enclose them. All the boards were sealed in PVA on both sides and left to dry overnight.

Now, I used to have some semi circular dowel which I was going to use to make some Nissen huts but I couldn't find it, so instead I made up a couple of dispersal areas out of foam core and stuck them down, similar in design to the resin model on the existing airfield. I can always add some buildings later if I find something suitable. 

I've had this Noch wheatfield mat in stock for well over ten years, possibly fifteen years (I bought it from Timecast at Triples years ago). Like many wargamers my current 'wheatfields' are cut up doormat, which looks OK but takes up tons of storage space, whereas this has a much sleeker profile.

I cut out various strips of wheatfield (it is stuck to thin plastic backing) to fit the MDF templates. The creases in the mat are horrible but will drop out when they are stuck down. 

Then glued it all into place with PVA. The creases have gone now. 

Once the foamcore had dried for a bit, I sprayed the whole airfield mid grey, then marked out the runways and hard standing and painted grass green craft Acrylic around the 'concrete' which also gave the impression of depth. 

I also daubed dark brown paint over the earth berms around the concrete dispersal areas. I'll add some flock later.

This shade of green is a fair bit lighter than on the original, but it produces more of a contrast so once it dries I'll maybe go over the other one in the same colour.

Once the wheatfields had dried, I edged the bases with builders sand. This had the curious effect of edging the crop sections too as the glue made the static grass stand up. It looks rather neat and was entirely unintended.

Finally I added a bit of Noch grass green flock to the field edges to break them up a bit.

Once it was all dry, into the terrain storage box it went. These six sections of field took up as much vertical space as a single piece of cut up floor mat. Result!

The extra airfield will be seen in action in due course, watch this space. 

Bridegrooms of Death - October 1941

 After our trip to Sicily with the 82nd Airborne and Tigers at Minsk, off to somewhere distinctly chillier, the Volkhov front near Leningrad in October 1941. This particular scenario features the 250 'Blue' Division, a formation which, like SS Handschar, apparently fascinates certain types of wargamers. In 1941, General Franco hit on a brilliant wheeze to both appease Hitler and deal with the fanatical Falangists demanding that Spain join in the 'Crusade against Bolshevism'. Franco packed them all off into the 250 Infantry Division, and sent them to the Eastern Front, conveniently removing an internal threat to his regime at the same time.

And here we are on the Volkhov River in October 1941, scene of numerous Soviet offensives during the Battle for Leningrad. The river is pretty obvious, running north-south there is a ridge on the left, a small building in the south, another in the centre and a wood to the north with a track through it.

The Russians have 98 minutes to take three of the four major features (the two buildings, the track junction and the ridge). The Spanish win if they still hold two of these objectives AND inflict enough losses for the Russians to reach their break point. The big complication being that there is a river in the way, and it is night....

To get over the river, the Russians have twelve rafts - here modelled as motley collection of my 6mm boats, rafts and 1/600th Higgins boats! I'm going to treat these as soft vehicles, with the travel across the river counting as one hex movement. So a loaded unit can move across the river and unload on the far bank in one turn. You really don't want to be caught by fire loaded up in one though.

Here are the defenders from the Blue Division (so called because of the colour of the fascist berets). Here they are wearing more practical steel helmets. This is a  weak company with three reduced strength platoons with two sections each, along with three SFMG sections and a light (50mm) mortar section. The rifle sections are all rated as 'heavy' (3D6 firepower) as although they may not have many men, they still have all their MG34s. They are all rated as veterans based on the original scenario, and their breakpoint is six.

Firefall Forward specifies that night visibility is 12", which becomes 2 hexes in TaM. The 50mm mortar also has one round of illumination in the original scenario, so for TaM I made that two rounds. These land at the vertex of three hexes and illuminate all three, lasting for two turns.

Eagle eyed readers will notice that I'm only using one base per section instead of the more usual two (so more like Crossfire). The reason being this....

An entire Rifle Battalion from 267 Rifle Division! In the original scenario these are organised into two companies each of three platoons of four squads, half regular, half green. I'd much rather fight with an actual battalion so I reorganised them into three companies.

The first had three small platoons of two sections each (regular).

The second and third were both the same, one platoon of three regular sections and two platoons each of three raw sections. There is also a battalion support company with two Maxim MMG sections.

The breakpoint for this lot is thirteen.

The Spanish have to set up on the ridge, but I've deployed them ready to occupy the forward objectives (historically it was a Spanish patrol which discovered the crossings). One section and an MG will head for the southern building. Two more sections, an MG and the mortar will head for the central building and at the top, two more sections and an MG will occupy the wood. I've kept one section in reserve.

For the Russians their main problem is managing the great mass of units on an eight hex front. I gave 1 Co (the regulars) a front of two hexes, four boats and a Maxim in support. Their initial objective was the southern building.

2 Co was allocated three hexes in the centre. They also have four boats and a maxim in support as they have the most exposed approach Their initial objective is the building in the centre.

3 Co was allocated the top three hexes of front, but their crossing was concentrated on a two hex front due the marsh, which provides no cover and is an impediment to movement. Their objective is the wood, and it is tantalisingly close.

Once they have taken their initial objectives, all three companies will push for the hill. Simple! It really is quite a horde lined up to cross the river, and will stretch the TaM C3 system to the limit, which for a night river crossing seems quite appropriate.

I put the Russian CO in the south to help the 'veteran' company across. Naturally everybody else rolled a ton of command failures (the green counters) so the crossing began to descend into chaos from turn one, particularly in the centre.

The Germans were more fortunate. I put the CO in the centre to ensure the critical central position was occupied, particularly the wood which got a squad, MG and the mortar. This position is ideal to drop illum rounds along the whole front.

The southern force occupied the building and the northern column made good progress in the wood.

Having got the first wave of 1 Co over the river, to CO moved north to help 3 Co across. The centre was left to itself and naturally rolled up loads of out of command units. So far they only have one section over the river! Good job it is a 98 minute game...

Things go quite well in the north and two Russian sections make it to the edge of the wood. The 50mm mortar drops an illum round on the crowded river crossing however (little stack of yellow counters). This lets units fire at the adjacent hexes as it was daylight.

The German fire is a bit subdued however, one Russian section attempting to cross the river is destroyed. The northern Spanish platoon moves up to occupy the woods, despite the lurking Russians outside.

Most of 1 Co are across the river in the south now, but 2 Co only have a platoon or so across. One section manages to occupy the isolated wood. In the north, a couple of sections move into the marsh, but the rest are still mucking about in boats. 

To keep the Spanish occupied, one section charges the MG position. I would have attacked with two sections but naturally one was out of command.

Although the Russians were destroyed, they managed to pin both the MG and Spanish section.

The 50mm mortar dropped illum on the southern front now, but the Spanish in the building went out of command so couldn't exploit it. The central building fired on the 2 Co units in the wood as well as shooting up the (still illuminated) crossings.

In the south, 1 Co is pretty much all across the river but was hit with two out of command markers. 2 Co is still largely stuck on the wrong bank.

In the north, things remained bloody. The other Russian section in the open was shot down, but the Russians in the marsh managed to destroy the northern Spanish section. The MG rallied but the supporting section didn't (anything but a 1!).

The Spanish committed their reserve section to the north as things were looking quite dodgy there. In the south and centre 1 Co and 2 Co were still forming up (largely) out of range of the defenders. A whole platoon of 2 Co and the Maxim are still stuck on the wrong side of the river.

In the north, 3Co tried to get as much strength as possible over the river to rush the woods. The last of the illum rounds burned out.

36 minutes on the clock and the Russians still aren't all over the river.

In the north, the Russians rush the woods, trying to break in before the reserves arrive. The Spanish MG is on fire and guns down two sections while pinning a third and managed to make its ROF roll for all three, so isn't even marked with an opportunity fire marker!

1 Co in the south has more luck, pushing up to within range of the southern building and just losing one section.

2 Co in the centre has a disastrous turn though, as both sections in the woods are gunned down, and it still has troops on the wrong side of the river. That was a big turn and a bad one for the Russians.

In the north the massacre continues as another Russians section is gunned down and another is pinned. The German reserves are now in position.

But in the south, most of 1 Co is now in range of the building, covered by the Maxim, with one section pinned and another shot down as they move up. In an exciting development, the Spanish MG ran out of ammunition shooting up the Russians!

2 Co has finally got everyone over the river and is forming up before moving forward into range.

Sadly, in the north the massacre continues as the Russians in the marsh are shot down. That is no less than twelve Russian units destroyed now.

Taking advantage of the loss of the MG, and covered by the Maxim, the Russians rush the southern building. The dice are the last Spanish sections opp fire roll, 1,6,6.... down goes another Russian section and that is their breakpoint reached.

1 Co holds firm in the south.

2 Co falls back to the river bank in the centre.

And in the north 3 Co lies dead, scattered in front of the Spanish positions.

So, as the Spanish have achieved their victory conditions (and the Russians have clearly failed) the game ends at 60 minutes. The Russians have lost 13 units and the Spanish just one, which is pretty much in line with the historical outcome.

That was very entertaining, and I thought the rules worked OK with the much larger unit count. The amount of dithering on the Russian side was epic, and seemed entirely appropriate for an attempted river crossing at night by a 1941 Russian force. The chaos was such that I wonder if the Russians would have failed to achieve their objectives against no opposition at all! For a better led force, I might double up the number of command stands, but tbh I prefer smaller games to this one. The battalion level games in Crossfire are also a bit silly I think, and end up being like the monster scenarios in Squad Leader.

Although I enjoyed that, I didn't feel any great inclination to play it again. There was a lot of stuff to push around and a lot of decisions to make, and I generally prefer smaller games to that one for solo play.