Invasion of the Balkans, April/May 1941

 After doing the 1940 French campaign, the next Unconditional Surrender scenario was the invasion of the Balkans and Greece in 1941. Not something I've gamed before at an operational level. This is another short campaign, rather like the the invasion of Denmark and Norway, with just two turns, but an awful lot of real estate to cover!

The starting setup. To win the Axis have to conquer both Yugoslavia and Greece by May 1941. The Yugoslav army is quite large and deployed to defend their key cities with three field armies and three garrison armies. Zagreb in particular is strongly defended and the critical rail route south via Belgrade and Nis is also directly defended.

The Greeks have a field army in Salonika and a garrison army facing the Italians on the Albanian border, while the 'BEF' start in central Greece barring the route to Athens. As usual, the very sticky ZOC do a lot of heavy lifting, the alternative would be three times as many counters.

The Axis are a mixed bunch, there are weak contingents of Hungarians and Bulgarians, while the best Italian units are in Albania, seriously handicapped by the awful terrain. The Italian unit in Trieste is just a garrison unit.

The Germans have four ground armies, two infantry and two panzer, plus a single Luftwaffe air fleet. One each of the panzer and infantry armies are in Bulgaria down on the Greek border, while the others are up in Hungary and Austria.

The Axis get lucky and roll fair weather (poor weather being rather more likely), so focus on trying to knock Yugoslavia out in April. The German infantry near the Brenner Pass attack Zagreb with air support and with multiple mobile attacks manage to push out and then destroy the Yugoslav defenders. 2WP to the Axis (they need six to conquer Yugoslavia). The Germans use the last of their movement to move down the valley but run out of steam.

The focus then shifts to Belgrade where 1st Panzer Group makes a frontal attack across the river with air support.

Both sides throw in a ground support unit, but it isn't enough and the Yugoslavs are forced out. Losing Belgrade is another 4WP so Yugoslavia surrenders and all the remaining combat units are removed. Despite surrendering the cities still count as Allied controlled and need to be occupied however, so 1st Panzer motors down the rail route and takes Nis although it doesn't have enough movement to reach Greece. Sarajevo and Split are still allied controlled at this point. 

The focus then shifts rapidly south to take advantage of the good weather. The Luftwaffe stages south to Bulgaria (leaving three sorties for operations). I don't even bother trying to attack the Greeks in the mountains along the Albanian border, as I think there is an opportunity to encircle them instead.

The German infantry attack Salonika with air support and force the Greeks there back into the peninsular as ZOCs preclude an escape westwards. A subsequent mobile attack forces them into the sea and they surrender. 3WP to the Axis, it takes 4WP for Greece to surrender - the only option is to take Athens.

Hard to spot, but the Hungarian and Italian units in the north have mopped up the Yugoslav cities, you can just see Sarajevo is in Axis control now. 2nd Panzer Group attacks the British near Thermopylae, but in the rugged terrain the attack is repulsed! The Germans attack again with the last of their air support and only succeed in forcing the British back. The Greeks on the the Albanian border can still (just) trace a supply line back to the road to Athens as ZOCS don't extend into friendly units for supply purposes. 

Apart from shuffling the Bulgarians around, the Axis have finished now. That would have been a very different proposition in bad weather, with more negative dice modifiers and no mobile attacks. I cant see Yugoslavia surviving, even in bad weather though, barring some good dice throws.

Due to the failure of 2nd Panzer Group in the mountains, the Allies have freedom of movement and set up a defence in depth of Athens with the Greeks holding the mountain passes and the BEF in Athens itself. I thought quite long and hard about that, the other obvious action would be to swap places, and looking at it now, possibly just put one unit in Athens and another on the single hex causeway to restrict the attack channel. Choices, choices.

The weather in May is clear too, this is the best possible set of weather results for the Axis. Given the very restricted front and distances involved, the attack on Athens will be undertaken by the Germans. 1st Panzer Group moves down from Yugoslavia to take on the Greeks - I want to save 2nd Panzer Group for Athens. The rough terrain imposes a heavy movement point cost on all these attacks.

1st Panzer manages to push back and destroy the Greeks (garrison units only have one step and out flanked and  unable to retreat, it is overrun). 1st Panzer could move next to Athens but doesn't have the MP left to attack it, so instead it leaves the approach hex open for 2nd Panzer. 

2nd Panzer goes in with the last German aircraft, plus ground support plus a paradrop (which gives another -2 on the defenders).

The British are driven out of Athens, pursued through Corinth and driven into the sea. Greece surrenders and the Axis win.

I wanted to try some different configurations of the defence of Athens. In this one the BEF defend in front of Athens, which gives them an extra retreat route. This leaves the city open to a paradrop, which has a 50% chance of taking the city. On my first try, the Axis paras took Athens.

On the second they didn't, and the Germans managed to push the BEF back into the city instead.

Their subsequent attacks were too weak however, and despite pulling out the panzers and throwing in the infantry, it was not enough to push the British out, so on this occasion the Allies won. So there is definitely something in that narrow approach to Athens from a defensive pov.

I enjoyed that, it was another thought provoking scenario although obviously much of the running was made by the Axis. It is a similar puzzle to invading Norway in that the Axis have a great deal to do with limited forces and a great deal of space. I can't imagine it being much fun as a two player game and I didn't feel any great desire to play it again, but it is quite quick to play and  I'd like to try it with the historical weather at some point.

Air War revisited

 There was a certain degree of chatter on the WhatsApp group about SPIs 'Air War'. I did play it a few times at the University wargames club in the early 1980s, but have little memory of it now. We agreed to set up a remote session to play through a few moves and remind ourselves of the joys (?!) of the game. At the time it was reputedly one of the most complex wargames ever designed, and long pre-dated decent computer flight simulators. 

As usual you can find the entire thing on https://www.spigames.net/ if you want to recreate that mid 1970s experience! You just need a few plain hex maps, a few aircraft counters and a printout of the aircraft control sheet and data sheets.

Half a dozen of us turned up (me, Nigel, Ian, Tim, Russell, John B) and we were also very fortunate to have the games original designer, David Isby, on the call. Along with working for SPI, David has written many books on military history and worked as a national security adviser on Afghanistan among other things. Amusingly he said he designed Air War when he was at Law School and before he actually learned to fly a plane.  

The others all set up their copies of the game, I just got out the aircraft data sheets and control sheets with the rules up on another monitor. The control sheets looked quite, familiar, this was coming back to me now. The idea was that we'd play through the introductory scenario side-by side as a play along (2 x Mig 15 vs 2 x F-86 in Korea). John B was lead pilot for the US and Ian D lead pilot for the North Koreans.

The fundamental premise of the game is that it tries to model the physics of flight through the application of forces in various dimensions, coupled with the flight characteristics of individual aircraft. The turns are short (2.5 seconds) so you can actually model the process of each manouvre eg you cant go into a steep climb without going into a shallow climb first, you bank before a turn, the degree of bank may result in loss of airspeed etc.

Along with the obvious things to track (altitude, speed, ammo etc) the critical track is the 'aircraft attitude' track, which is essentially a 2D representation of the different positions of the plane in three dimensions (climb,dive and bank) as well as some specific things to track the energy gained during a dive and degrees of turn accumulated. To turn one hex vertex requires you to accumulate 30 degrees of turn, and as these are jets doing 500mph through 500 foot hexes, it takes several hexes of movement to accumulate enough 'turn' to physically re-point the counter without tearing the wings off the plane.

So to pull any sort of manouvre, even just a 90 degree turn let alone an Immelman, requires a degree of forethought as it will take several (very short) moves.

The scenario starts with both flights of planes parallel (US blue, NK red), the MiGs are 1000 feet higher) and a few thousand feet apart. The MiGs have cannon, the F86s .50 cals, so the  MiGs have to get in close but hit hard, while the F86 have a much longer range, tons more ammo but dont land such heavy blows. The MiGs are more manouverable at lower altitude and the F86 superior higher up, but both planes turn much better than 1970s era jets. Neither of them is powerful enough to pull off a vertical climb though.

The aircraft data sheets list the energy costs and altitude and direction etc changes for various types of manouvre, and where appropriate, the differences any different altitiudes.  

Apologies for the blurry picture. Each plane resolves its move individually and fire is resolved at the end of all movement. There is an initiative system and a system for determining 'advantage' which allows a plane to go later in the turn. So ideally you want to have the advantage, wait for the enemy to move, and then skilfully fly your plane to within one hex of their tail and blow them out of the sky.

If only it was so easy! The US banked right and climbed gently (type I climb) to gain altitude, which cost them some speed. The NK banked left and dived to come down towards the US planes. The first turn took us about 30 minutes while we figured out how the various control settings actually moved the plane. After the first turn, things speeded up a lot as we just flicked through the rules or delved our memories as to how things worked.

We ended up with both sides at the same altitude and facing each other! Ian had obviously played this more recently than the others and showed a certain degree of competence in manouvering the MiGs, however as so often happens in this game, he slightly misjudged where the planes would end up and it was the US who got off the first shot! At medium range and maximum deflection (he'd at least planned that) they missed hopelessly though. Ideally you need to be within 2 hexes and on the targets tail and that clearly wasn't going to happen in any sensible length of time so we called it a day having exercised the major mechanisms over 90 minutes or so.

That was a lot of fun and nice to trawl through the depths of my brain for this stuff. It did remind me of the main issue I had with the game at the time, while it models the mechanics of flying very well within the limitations of carboard counters, is very hard indeed to actually fly the planes to get them where you want them to go without lots of practice in energy management and how the various numbers interact. Flying the same thing in a computer flight sim is a lot more intuitive once you understand the basic principles of powered flight. You can still mess up manouvres, overshoot, stall etc but it all happens much faster. Anyway there was a certain amount of enthusiasm to repeat the experience, but this time using planes armed with missiles, and it was great having David participate, even if he said he felt like a dinosaur talking to a load of paleontologists at times.

More Leaders pt 4 - German

 Last of the leadership review was the Germans. As older figures originally based for tactical games they were short of higher HQs, but I had plenty of decent individual junior leader and officer figures already.

This was a much more minimal effort than the British, Russians and French. I just re-based some existing figures.

This early war battalion HQ is just a pair of individual figures re-purposed. A kneeling PSC NCO (I think he is probably a gunner) and a QRF officer in a cap from the German WW2 personality set. I've no idea who he is supposed to represent as it is an awful figure, but he is fine as a generic officer (despite his Generals red stripes on his breeches!).

These are my late war Germans, of a similar vintage to my British, all Peter Pig. They had too many (two figure) battalion HQs and no (three figure) Regimental HQ, so I just prised off the figure with the pistol and based him individually, then added an officer in a helmet with binoculars. The third figure on the RHQ base is one of those wierd dismounted tank crewmen figures Battlefront liked to supply in days past (presumably to indicate bailed status).

Most of these figures were painted when my eyesight was much better, I've apparently managed to do Peadot camo by hand. Well, well.

The back of the RHQ stand so you can see the crewman a bit better. I didn't bother repainting him despite his black panzer trousers. He isn't waving a gun around so better suited to a higher HQ stand, perhaps he is kneeling down looking for the COs cigars or something.

More useful additions, and no painting required. When I was putting these in their respective boxes I realised I'd got mixed up with these too, the early war Germans had the correct number of HQs already, it was the Russians still missing one. Put it down to a senior moment.

Gembloux Gap 1940

 More Dominion of the Blitzkrieg, this time the Low Countries in May 1940. This scenario is billed as the Battle of Gembloux Gap on 13/14 May 1940, but looking at the composition of forces, it bears more resemblance to the Battle of Hannut which took place two days earlier as 2nd and 3rd DLM covered the deployment of 1st Army and were engaged by 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions. Anyway, historical account here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gembloux_(1940)

And here we are, Gembloux is the centre bottom of the map, Hannut at the mid top, the River Sambre is on the right and the Dyle on the left. The open ground between the two rivers being the 'gap'. It is a popular place for battles as Wavre is on the left, and Waterloo a few miles further west.

The pre-war Allied plan involved moving into Belgium and building a defence line along the Dyle river, the Wavre-Gembloux-Sambre line was the eastern extension of that. The 'Dyle Plan' absorbed almost the entire French mobile reserve, leading to Churchills lament later in the campaign Ou est le mass de manouvre?

Anyway, here are the baddies, 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, 20th Motorised Division and 35th Infantry Division of XVI Panzer Corps. Although both panzer divisions had numerous vehicles (over 300 tanks each in four battalions), these were not first rate divisions and they were mainly equipped with Pz I and Pz II as was 9th Panzer Division in the Netherlands. All these formations task was to attract the Allies attention and keep them pinned. The Germans lost around 150 tanks at Hannut but repaired two thirds of them.

In the front line we have two tank units (3rd Panzer, 4th Panzer) and an infantry unit (20th Mot). In reserve is another nameless tank unit, 35th Infantry Division and a unit of bombers. All these units are average.

The French have 2nd and 3rd Light Mechanised Divisions (DLM), somewhat battered after two days of fighting at Hannut, but equipped with a far higher proportion of gun armed tanks (Somuas and H39s) than the Germans and with thicker armour too. The French also lost around 150 tanks at Hannut but were forced to abandon most of them, so here the units are just rated as regular tank units. III Motorised Corps had the 1st Moroccan Division (DM) and 15th Motorised Infantry Division (15 DIM), both first rate formations.

So here we have 1 DM dug in and modelled as disciplined infantry with AT guns, in the centre 2nd DLM (tanks) and on the right 15 DIM, also disciplined infantry.

In reserve are 3rd DLM (tanks) and the Corps artillery - a regular artillery piece with two fire missions. I used a Chinellette carrier to represent the ammo state for the artillery.  The Somuas and H39s are all QRF as are the Pz I, while the Pz II are Peter Pig. 

Things kick off with Stukas inffectively attacking 2nd DLM in the centre, but 1 DM on the left managed to fluff it and are overrun by 3rd Panzer Division! The French artillery fired on the tanks needing a 3+ and missed, then the AT guns fired needing 5+ to hit and missed then finally the tanks hit on a 6. You can work out the odds. 

To add insult to injury the 3rd DLM in reserve failed to move leaving an open flank.

Fierce fighting in the centre as 2nd DLM was destroyed by Stukas, but their place was taken by 3rd DLM bravely driving through the bombs and forestalling 4th Panzer. 

3rd DLM kept going, supported by the French artillery and routed 4th Panzer. Ouch!

In the centre fresh panzer reserves moved up. Lack of French air power made this 'anything but a 1'. The dice decreed the German right would attack, and 20th Mot duly bounced off 15 DIM.

The dice decreed more fighting on the right and this time the Germans came out on top, rather against the odds.

With 3rd DLM committed, the French gunners suddenly found themselves firing over open sights. No reinforcement roll here as the Germans were using infantry.

3rd DLM and the new panzers suffered mutual annihilation, but the German still had more reserves to throw in and 35th Infantry Div took over in the centre.

The French gunners were assaulted by 20th Mot but easily repelled them. Reduced to just one unit however, it was all over for 1st Army. That was actually a pretty historical result as both sides suffered heavy but fairly similar armour losses and eventually the French were forced back.

Time for another run as these rules are pretty random and the Germans were very fortunate at times in that one.

This one opened in much the same way with an ineffective bombing attack on 2nd DLM, and  a French attack by 1 DM on the left. This time the odds told and 3rd Panzer was routed by the French AT guns, 35th Infantry moving up to take their place who could fight the French on equal terms (both needing 6 to hit!).

More ineffective bombing on 2nd DLM, but 20th Mot was routed by the 15 DIM on the right. Reserve panzers moved up to take their place.

The dice decreed combat on the left, and both sides managed to roll a 6. Mutual annihilation!

3rd DLM moved up into the gap easily as there was no German armour opposing them. All the Germans could do was commit the Luftwaffe to try and interdict the gap, which also precluded their offensive bombing operations.

The Germans attacked 15 DIM on the right, and the French fired their artillery in support and managing to throw a miserable 1. The attack failed in any case (the tanks now needed a 6 to hit the entrenched infantry).

3rd DLM advanced on the left...

And broke through the bombing! The German right flank was now in the air.

And it was over pretty quickly after that as 2nd and 3rd DLM crushed 4th Panzer between them. Which just goes to show the Germans don't have it all their own way in 1940.

That was a very enjoyable scenario, and as usual I enjoyed looking up historical stuff up about it. I ran a Hannut game a few years ago using NATO Brigade Commander but it strikes me as an obvious candidate for One Hour WW2.

I felt much more confident with the nuances of the Blitzkrieg rules, and I think I've got the hang of rolling for reserves to arrive. I may have made a few mistakes, but if I did, they didn't show and the narrative of both battles was very convincing. One thing this set does quite well is capture the knife edge which 'Blitzkrieg' style armoured operations work on, if it goes well it goes very well, but once the combined arms machine starts to unravel, it all goes horribly wrong very quickly. Air support is absolutely critical as without it, things devolve into a low odds slugging match.

Amerika Bomber

 Another delightfully tasteful game, "Amerika Bomber" from Compass Games. This is designed as a solo game but we ran it as one of our online team efforts. I gather it has a very short print run and is virtually unobtainable, but Tim obtained one.

A cover worthy of Airfix Magazine, I think those are Me 264s.. The game background is an alt-hist 1947 situation - Germany has conquered Europe but the war with the USA continues, including long range bombing raids mounted from the Azores. This is basically an excuse to field various experimental aircraft (Hortens and such-like), fly them to the US, and bomb stuff. 

Its a classic bomber management game, like B17 and so on, but the detail is delightful. This is the template for an Me 364, a six engined upgrade to the Me 264, featuring such jollity as remote turrets. This is essentially a German B29/B36.  The boxes mark all the various aircraft systems, as well as airframe and wing integrity. Losing these impedes mission success or might result in the loss of the plane.

Our first missions would be in one of these, and if the crew did well, we might be allowed more advanced aircraft. The plane mainly carries conventional bombs, but has space in the bomb bay for an Atomic Bomb, should the Fuhrer grace us with one of those.

Everyone went overboard in the hat front. Jim even managed to fashion an ersatz Luftwaffe uniform with a printed out chest eagle and yellow post-it notes for Luftwaffe collar tabs. I was a lowly Feldwebel (electronic warfare and bombardier!) so just wore my Luftwaffe side cap.

I cant recall who everyone was, I think John was the pilot, Jim the co-pilot, Jerry was a gunner, perhaps Terry was the navigator? The plane had quite a big crew so many people doubled up.

The game runs very much like the solo submarine games - we roll up a mission, then have to navigate to a target and do stuff to it, and then get home. Unlike the submarine games, we aren't looking for things to attack, but trying to avoid enemy fighters and AA. Generally the missions are bombing, but can include stuff like leaflet drops, inserting an agent etc.

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Our first mission was to bomb the Bethlehem Steel Works in Pennsylvania. We had loads of air contacts in and out, carrier launched Bearcats and no less than four P-80 Shooting Stars. Contacts are resolved n the chart above - the attacking planes are assigned to one of the approaches (yellow is vertical, either climb or dive) and the turrets can only hit certain arcs so you need to assign them correctly. 

We managed to down three of the fighters and took moderate damage but made it to the target OK, hit it successfully (30% accuracy) and made it home OK. Somewhere along the way we lost our upper turret but fortunately werent bounced from that direction.

Mission two was to bomb the Big Inch Pipeline Company in Illinois, but we'd only flown two zones over the Atlantic before the plane suffered a total electrical failure and we lost all our electronic systems. We had to abort and return to base, fortunately the weather wasn't too bad so we didn't need the blind landing radar and we got down OK.

Mission three was to attack Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, again we got bounced by P80s but managed to bomb the target and return to base successfully. Our pilot (John) now qualified for a 2nd Class Iron Cross.

The following three missions were in a similar vein, although on mission five we (I) managed to miss the target completely! Sadly on mission six we were turning for home after a successful bomb run and were hit in the wing by P80s (naturally) and one of the fuel tanks caught fire! This wasn't surviveable damage but we were still over land so made an emergency landing near Boston, which was a bit bumpy but we survived. We were all then taken prisoner, for us the war was over.

That was a great game, very enjoyable and worked extremely well as a team game. It was also very timely getting shot down ten minutes before time to pack up, so if/when we do it again we can start with a fresh crew. It rattled along much faster than the U-Boat games as there were fewer contacts to resolve and the fighter and AA engagements were generally fairly short.

Panzer replacements - 1st Company

 I've occasionally ruminated in previous posts about replacing some of my older vehicles with more modern models. Replacing them means it wont take up any more storage space as I'll dispose of the old ones, but I'll have the fun of painting more tanks. As regular readers may have gathered, I like painting tanks.

I finally got around to doing something about it, and ordered some more toys, vaguely structured as an early war panzer battalion in Command Decision terms, even though I rarely play 1 base = 1 platoon games any more. It is just an easy organisation system and scales up and down fine for operational and tactical games. Essentially they are one for one replacements of the existing models I bought decades ago though. 

So here is the '1st Light Company', a platoon of Panzer IIs and two platoons of Panzer IIIs. I've got some old Panzer Is too but I'm not replacing those yet.  Early war panzer battalions had two or three light companies with a mix of Pz I, II and III, plus a medium company. These are all resin 3D prints from Battlefield 3D, and I endured the usual six week long wait from order to delivery, but it is always worth the wait as the models are exquisite.

First up is a Panzer II F. A lovely crisp little model, and sized well. It is a similar size to my old Peter Pig Panzer IIs and somewhat bigger than my Zvezda ones which are notoriously undersized.

It is a two piece print, just the hull and turret and very little clean up required, just a few stray support struts. I was a bit anxious about the 20mm cannon and coax MG as they are quite thin. The resin is fairly springy, but I stiffened them up with some PVA which didn't noticeably thicken them.

Lovely crisp detail on the engine deck. I ran some pinwash into the air grilles after the main paint job. As it is first company they all have similar numbers - red outlined in white. For some variety I just put 131 on the turret bin for this one. I also added a rolled tarp on one of the stowage boxes (from the Skytrex vehicle stowage pack).

Otherwise it is pretty plain although the tracks contrast pleasingly with the hull colour, just like the Bovingdon one. I did paint all the tyres, and although it is hard to see, it lifts the model considerably. That balkan cross behind the aerial rail was an absolute pig to stick on. Once of the nice things about resin print is the level of physical detail, but they do make some modelling jobs hard. 

Next up is this lovely Pz IIIe. It is beautifully modelled and has managed to capture that rather fragile pre-war look. This model had separate tracks and turret,and  I went for an open turret hatch option. the commander is a spare PSC one. Well, it was supposed to be a platoon commanders tank irl.

I added a couple of jerry cans on the rear engine deck and highlighted the tow cable with Boltgun Metal and Nuln Oil. Fairly obviously I've also done this one grey and brown camo! This was the official scheme from July 1937 to July 1940 but it persisted into the Russian campaign as older vehicles were only generally repainted when refurbished. I wanted to do a few of my early war vehicles in this scheme as even the Bovingdon Pz II is in grey and brown now. Because both tones are very similar, it doesn't show up well in black and white photos.

Turret number 113 for this one, still red and white.

Finally we have a Pz III H, a much more business like looking vehicle. This has got more modern drive and idler wheels than the Pz IIIe, it also has spare track slung on the lower front hull and very obviously applique armour on the hull front and mantlet as well as a turret bin. It is armed with a 50L42 gun, but with the fine detail 3D print it is very hard to distinguish from the 37mm gun on the E.

The engine deck is different to the E and it has wider tracks and spare wheels mounted on the fenders. I added the oil drum.

I did this one in overall panzer grey, turret number 124. The base colour for all the vehicles was similar - undercoat black, spray the upper surfaces white then a base coat of either Humbrol Sea Grey or Coat D'Arms Uniform Grey followed by a heavy wash of Vallejo Panzer Grey diluted to various thicknesses to vary the coverage and overall tone. I was after a range of greys, which I did achieve, but the weathering tended to blend them all back into a more uniform tone.

This is what they are replacing, my old Peter Pig Pz III and Pz IIs. Perfectly fine models in their time (I bought these in the late 90s when metal 15mm tanks were £3.50!), but just a bit crude compared to modern ones, particularly the running gear. They have seen long and sterling service, but time for an upgrade.

Sizewise they all match nicely.

I'm very pleased with those and I'm looking forward to getting them into action soon. More replacements to follow!