Panzerblitz again - Buchach scenario

 After playing the Panzerblitz partisan mini scenario, I had a hankering to re-visit some of my favourite old scenarios. One of these was scenario Number 11, which covered the relief of Hubes encircled panzer army by IInd SS Panzer Corps in April 1944. This battle is also covered in the Cross of Iron supplement for Squad Leader, albeit at a tactical level. 

The Russians are defending with 20th Guards Mechanised Brigade and 9th SS Panzer Regiment has to break through. 20th Guards aren't strong enough to defend in depth, but the Germans have to maintain a corridor right across the board, so the trick for the Russians is to delay the Germans then counterattack to cut the corridor late in the game. Conversely the Germans need to carve out and then defend a corridor with lots of tanks and not much infantry, which makes this a fabulous mobile battle and both sides have to attack and defend all at once.

The Russian OB isn't bad,  a full mechanised brigade with an integral tank regiment. The Russian infantry are powerful, but their armour is completely outmatched. The SS are a panzer fetishists dream though, two full strength panzer battalions with twelve(!) platoons of tanks each, including a dozen Panther platoons, a full Stug battalion and a battalion of armoured Panzergrenadiers. More on that later.

The Russian 20th Mech Brigade, with three motorised Rifle Battalions, a Tank Regiment, Mortar Battalion, Artillery Battalion, Recce Co and various bits and pieces. I modified the OB from the PB standard one to better fit a historical OB, but there weren't many changes.

The teeth arms. I replaced the scenario T34/85s with T34/76, Mech Brigade tank regiments just weren't a priority for T34/85s especially in April 1944, and an awful lot of them had Shermans anyway.

Each Motorised Rifle Battalion has three Guards Rifle companies, a mortar company and a towed 45mm AT company. As before, I'll triple the firepower of the mortars to better reflect their real effects. A couple of anomalies show up here, according to the designers notes the mortar and 45mm companies include trucks, yet four 45mm AT guns mysteriously require a whole additional truck company stand to tow them. I guess the game designers couldn't figure out how to model integral transport within the unit counter model and in the counters had added all sorts of spurious stuff to justify the Russians only being able to stack two units per hex and the Germans three. I'm going to use separate trucks for the rifle companies but just use the trucks as markers for the mortars and AT guns, but it would have been far more sensible to stick with constant company sized stands for the Russians (so some sort of motorised weapons company stand). 

Brigade assets. The recce company I did as two mechanised recce platoons - the halftracks represent a mix of different vehicles which is why their defence is only 2. There aren't any Russian light tanks or armoured cars in the counter mix, which is a curious omission. If there weren't so many (spurious) truck and wagon counters, they could have put some light vehicles in the mix.

The SMG, Engineer and AA companies are all represented as individual stands with trucks to carry them (although the AA company should be Quad Maxims mounted in Gaz AA).

The mortar battalion has a company of 120s and two companies of 82mm mortars. These suffer the same problem as their 45mm pals, the counter info says they include trucks, but to actually move they require separate truck stands. I'm just going to use some wagons to show they are mounted. The firepower of the 120s is sensible, but I'll triple the firepower of the 82s. I've included a CP to spot for them, which I will assume is vehicle mounted, despite the game errata saying they need yet another entire truck company to move six guys and a radio around. Jeez.

Finally the 76mm artillery battalion. Well, because some of the Russian 76mm guns at the Aberdeen Proving Ground are listed as AT guns, AHGC decided to make all Russian 76.2mm guns into AT guns, even when they weren't. They only way to fix this is to double the firepower of the guns, make them H class and not A class, and quadruple their range - this makes them into relatively bad field guns (24H range 20 hexes or 5km, compared to 40H and range 32 for the German 105), but maintains their AT value. Like the other towed guns, they also supposedly have integral trucks on the counter, yet mysteriously require a separate truck stand to move, so once again I'm just going to use wagons to show if they are limbered or not. As with the mortars, I've added a motorised CP stand to spot for them.

OK, that is the Russians sorted.

The revised German OB, 9th SS Panzer Regiment, an armoured Panzergrenadier battalion and an armoured panzer artillery battalion. I did a fair bit of research as to what 9th SS Panzer Div actually had in April 1944.

The armoured PG battalion. The game OB includes all sorts of extra mortars and wierd bits which aren't standard at all. I've modelled this on an actual 1944 PG battalion, which for the 9th SS was at full strength in April as this was their first action after finishing divisional training. Three mechanised PG companies and a mechanised heavy company with a platoon each of 120mm mortars, Pak 40s and Engineers. Ideally the PG platoons would have a bit more firepower, but I wasn't going to start fiddling with the infantry counters. The battalion is also completely missing the twelve Sdkfz 251/9 'Stummel' SP 75mm guns it is supposed to have, no counters for these are included.

I added in a couple of the Regimental support platoons to beef them up a bit, the Flak platoon is fairly obvious, but for bizarre reasons the 150mm 'Grille' platoon is modelled as a 2 vehicle sections, which makes it almost useless. At least in Panzer Leader you get three of these for the whole platoon, but not PB. This unit will have its firepower tripled.  

I seriously thought about adding the 'Maultier' unit to model the missing Stummels, as a dozen 75mm infantry guns should have a firepower of around 20H, but in the end decided against it.

The Panzer Regiment. Where have all the Panthers gone? Well, 9th SS Panzer Div did have a Panther Battalion, but it didn't arrive until June, and even by late June wasn't combat ready as it was missing its workshop company. It finally saw action in Normandy during Operation Epsom.

In April 1944, 9th SS PR had a single battalion of four companies, each on the 17 vehicle organisation, two of Panzer IV and two of Stugs, exactly the same organisation as 10th SS PR in fact, and which 10th SS used in Normandy. The division didn't have a separate Stug battalion either, they were all in the panzer 'regiment' .

So, I gave them six Pz IV and six Stugs. There aren't enough Stug counters, so Hetzers are close enough. I won't even start on why Stugs have the same defence value as Tigers because they are in platoons of six. Panzer Leader tied itself into even bigger knots over platoon sizes, with multiple different Panther and Sherman counters. Just stick to one vehicle platoon counter = five combat vehicles guys, it is much easier.  

The regiment did have a Flak platoon with Flakpanzer 38s, the closest thing in the box was a Wirblewind counter, that will do. The Panzer Artillery Battalion was quite easy too, a Hummel and two Wespe platoons, and I gave them a motorised CP as well.

So there we have it for 9th SS Panzer Div, not quite the armoured behemoth in the original scenario! It will still give an interesting mobile game though.

Despite the moaning, I actually enjoyed this exercise quite a lot. I like researching OBs and figuring out how to model them in game terms. What it mainly highlighted for me was how much more we know about the Eastern Front now than in the early 1970s, and how simulation techniques have evolved in leaps and bounds over the decades. Sadly what it also highlighted are the limitations of the Panzerblitz game model, and having done my best to model the correct OBs within the constraints of the game system, I had no great desire to actually play the scenario. Yes, I could write a load of rules mods, and make up my own counters to cover missing units types, with transport indicated, modified combat factors, maybe  even separate soft and armoured attack factors, but life is too short.

Ah well, nostalgia isn't all it is cracked up to be sometimes, but it was an interesting exercise. Back in the loft it goes.

15mm Renault UE (again)

 The missing French items from my QRF order eventually turned up, and I finally got around to painting some of them. First up are a pair of QRF Renault UE, with trailers.

These are lovely little models which come with trailers and stowage included. The stowage is separate so you can put it in different configurations. There isn't any assembly required apart from the stowage.

There is a lot of fine moulded detail for a metal model, although the tracks were slightly deformed as they are so thin.

To save on space I based them with the trailers as close to the towing vehicle as possible. I did them  overall olive green so they would do for both French and Rumanian service. Otherwise they just got an overall drybrush of tan to lighten them up a bit and pick out the highlights.

As I'd already got some BPM Renault UE, I lined them up for comparison. Oooer missus! The BPM one has obviously eaten all the buns. Mmmm, that isn't great actually. QRF are generally pretty good at sticking to 1/100th scale, so I suspect the BPM one is out.

I also clearly used a different pot of green paint for the BPM models, I could have sworn it was VJ894, but obviously not. 

It isn't the end of the world as they are still both tiny vehicles, although hilariously the BPM one is on exactly the same size base as the QRF one including its trailer. Note to self for the future, cheaper isn't necessarily better.

Anyway, useful additions no doubt and handy for a range of things, possibly even standins for Konsomlets tractors, should that be required.

The Ring of Five

John B took us on a trip to 1920s Berlin as crime fighters investigating strange goings on with a somewhat Cthulhu-esque angle to it. This is a sideshoot of his long running early twentieth century RPG campaign involving a number of characters in various alt history activities.

We were all cast as police of various types, I was Kommissar Bernhard Steyer of the Kripo with my trusty Wachmeister (John A), and tagging along for the ride was Russell from the Prussian Police (later the Gestapo), Pete from the Security Police (SD), Micheal as the Police Forensic Examiner and Tim as a youthful Kapitan-Lt Canaris, from some shady intelligence outfit.

RPGs are never very photogenic I'm afraid, but we did break out a few hats. As a big fan of Kommisar Gereon Raths adventures in the 'Babylon Berlin' series, I broke out my fedora and jaunty shirt for a night of cocaine and benzedrine fuelled dancing, as favoured by the good inspector to wind down.

Sadly my revelries were interrupted by news of a murder! A body had been found, apparently hacked to death outside the notorious Ring of Five club.

John provided us with a beautiful map of 1920s Berlin, which came in very handy, although many of the roads in the city centre still have the same names and follow the same routes on Google Maps.

Off we went to the night club to investigate whatever was happening. I won't bore you with a blow by blow account, but we uncovered what appeared to be a widespread conspiracy involving both various different political factions and a secret society with an interest in the occult and Teutonic supremacy. There were various references to 'Carcosa' and 'The Yellow King' as well as writings in an indecipherable form of ancient Cunieform. 

Thanks to excellent police work, we identified the baddies lair and it ended up in a shoot out as we stormed a flat in Moabit. We rescued a hostage, and very conveniently killed the head of the local German Workers Party (I'm sure they won't get anywhere) who also had the murder weapon in his possession. Case closed.

The only slight wrinkle was that the other main suspect, a gentleman of military bearing wearing a monocle, apparently disappeared in a flash of light as our police fought their way through the building. Although publically the case was closed and a serial killer brought to justice, these disturbing developments, along with links to the activities of Austrian agents and the involvement of Albert Einstein in some unspecified way, meant the privately the case was very much open. The Security Service took over and we were all seconded to the ongoing investigation. The next instalment awaits!

That was brilliant fun, very well researched, good fun to play and very atmospheric. The game was more on the realistic side of RPGs (so no level 20 Paladins with 200 hit points), and our various familiarities with police and forensic procedures came in very handy. I'm looking forward to the next one. 

 

Little World Wars playtest

 We've had a few 54mm WW2 outings over the years, and Tim has been working on various revisions to get the 'feel' right. The latest version is tentatively titled 'Little World Wars' and I went over to playtest it, following a remote session with Russell.

It is pitched at a similar scale to Little Cold Wars, with each vehicle or gun representing a platoon, but the infantry are modelled as six figure companies or 2/3 figure weapons platoons, rather than the four figure platoons of LCW.

Battlefield from the east. The Russians set up around the crossroads nearest the camera, and need to clear the village on the far side of the table of Germans.

The Soviet hordes. A reinforced Rifle Battalion (four rifle companies) supported by a company of T34s plus various heavy weapons and offtable artillery. The T34s are 1/48th (or possibly 1/56th?) scale plastic models.

The German infantry, three panzergrenadier companies, plus some heavy weapons and a very obvious Tank Hunter platoon armed with Panzerschrecks.

Closer view of the Russian infantry, the ATR, MG and mortar platoons on the right, Battalion HQ top right and four companies of six figures each on the left. Mostly plastic figures from a range of manufacturers.

The German vehicle fleet, some lovely Tamiya(?) 1/48th scale Horch Cars, lorries and a Kubelwagen, suported by a dodgy Chinese plastic SP 20mm AA halftrack and a very passable Panzer IV. Star of the show is the stunning Corgi Panther, a metal diecast.

The Russians set up in the village. There is a diminutive BA64 in the lead. I wasn't sure about the weapon ranges so I set up rather conservatively behind the ridge.

The German forward defence with two rifle companies and two MG platoons, supported by the Pz IV platoon.

I spent a few turns shaking the Russian infantry out into assault waves. The moves were only 4", so this took a while, deliberately short as the table is small. The 76mm Infantry gun busily shelled the Germans while this was going on, and the tanks lurked.

There was a bit of a traffic jam in town with all the trucks and Bren Carriers of the support company cluttering things up. It kept the female traffic control NCO quite busy! Each company is dealt a card and activates in card order, so it is very easy to get some horrendous traffic jams if the units activate in the 'wrong' order.

Urrah! Unfortunately both the BA64 and one of the T34s was knocked out in short order. The infantry shrugged off the enemy small arms fire however.

The Russian covering fire had caused some losses, and the T34s had even managed to knock our the Pz IV. Tank gunnery was by Nerf Gun against various sized targets. The Panther was well forward by now.

Only one T34 left at this point, which very wisely hunkered down hull down supporting the infantry. The company on the top right are very close to the rail line now, and the carriers with the battalion MG and ATR platoons are in close support.

The 76mm gun is down to one crew figure by now though and withdraws, drawn by the truck. 

The Russians are into the first hedgerow, and outflanking the handful of Germans to their left. The chap on his own is due to a neat mechanism - when infantry become casualties, you can attempt to reorganise them, and possibly they recover, or are removed permanently. The chance of recovery is improved by the presence of a medic. This is very similar to the casualty check in Stargrunt II, and is a mechanism I really like.

The last Russian tank is knocked out, but it has done its job as the infantry are very close to their first objective now. The MG platoon was extremely effective in laying down withering covering fire, as was the battalion mortar platoon.

The Germans are looking distinctly ragged now.

Sadly the card sequence let me down. The rear company activated first and moved up behind the lead company, and before they could play their 7 of clubs, the German mortars activated and dropped a stonk right in the middle of the bunch up troops. Six guys down. Ouch!

The Russians are well into the hedgerows now and the remaining Germans bug out back to the village. By this stage though, the Russians have lost over half their infantry and all their AFVs, so they don't really have the strength to clear the town.

We called it a day at that point. The Germans are back in the town, but the Russians need reinforcements to continue the attack.

That was lots of fun, and Tim had already run this scenario with Russell so had plenty of feedback. My main suggestions were that infantry moves were perhaps a bit short and that the spotting rules could be simplified considerably, possibly just restricted to units which start the game stationary. I hadn't realised at the time, but Tim obviously also thought artillery and mortar fire was a bit too accurate based on some of the future revisions. 

As I said in the intro, this is a scale of unit representation I like in WW2 as battalion to brigade level allows for genuine combined arms forces, and avoids some of the artificiality of very tactical games where a platoon is magically reinforced by a single tank, some random machine gunners and some Army level artillery assets.

15mm BA 64 armoured cars

 I picked up a trio of BA 64s second hand at the recent Steel Warriors show. They used to belong to Frank, a stalwart of the club, who died suddenly earlier this year.

Here they are chugging along. The only other Soviet armoured cars I have are early war ones, and while my late war recce troops have carriers, Valentines and motorcycles, they don't have any suitable armoured cars, so these are ideal.

I don't know who the manufacturer is, although I assume Battlefront. They appear to be resin or plastic, not metal, and come with either ATRs or MGs as armament.  

They are nice little models, and very diminutive compared to my BA-10s. They were done in a very dark green, so I went over them with a heavy drybrush of Russian camo green (Vallejo 894) to lighten them a bit. The commanders were in black uniforms as well, so I re-did them in khaki. Otherwise they didn't need much painting.

I dirtied them up a bit with a light tan drybrush, which picked up the edges on the angular armour and other details nicely and highlighted the weapons in boltgun metal. Otherwise it was just a matter of basing them.

As I had the Russian Green out, I also repainted one of the old lorries Tim has donated to me. This one is a Zvezda Gaz AA. I managed to break one of the front wheels off getting it off its old base (stuck down with hot glue!). Otherwise it was just the same treatment as the armoured cars albeit with added glass.

These are lovely models which take a drybrush very well.

I usually do the canvas tilts khaki, (VJ English Uniform) but I didn't shake the bottle up enough and it came out a shiny light green as the pigment hadn't mixed properly. I hate dropper bottles, give me a proper pot of paint any day. I've still got one old pot of Humbrol acrylic from 1997.

Anyway, I couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, so I let to dry and just gave it a heavy drybrush of tan, which ended up looking OK. 

One more truck to add to the collection. You can never have too many.

Conference of Wargamers 2023

 The Conference of Wargamers (COW) has for many years been hosted at Knuston Hall in Northamptonshire, sadly the hall has now closed and is up for sale. In 2021, the conference was hosted (at quite short notice) at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, but this year we moved to a new venue in Buckinghamshire, Missenden Abbey.

The Abbey was founded in the 12th century, and has been extensively added to since then, although some parts of the original building survive. It is now a University conference centre and event/wedding centre, and ideal for our purposes with plenty of rooms for games, good on-site accommodation and fairly centrally located in England.

There are also lovely grounds and gardens to walk about in. Or possibly host lawn games...

I put on a couple of sessions, took part in a number of games and observed a number of others. I'll probably report on a number of the games as (short) separate posts, but a few highlights. 

The Conference opened with a large plenary game involving all the attendees and covering the opening days of the Weimar Republic in 1918/1919.

As might be expected, decadance and violence went hand in hand as the various factions vied for power. I was cast as Karl Leibknecht, leader of the Spartacists, I can't think why. As our brave street fighters were crushed by right wing Freikorps, it soon became apparent that Germany wasn't ready for world revolution, so we made our escape to Paris with 11 Billion Reichsmarks and enough weapons and ammo to start a small war. Better than ending up floating face down in a canal anyway.

I ran my venerable 'Good Morning, Good Morning' (WW1 in Three Turns) game on Friday night. It is a quick single player game covering divisional level trench assaults on the western front in 1916, 1917 and 1918. It first came to COW in 2001 but I have tweaked it a bit since then.

Mark F, one of our regular remote gaming group, put on  a big naval campaign game using a mish-mash of Nimitz and the old AHGC 'Battle at Sea' (?) WW1 naval rules.

Tim G, another Sheffield regular, put on a session with his 'Little World Wars' 54mm WW2 game. I was roped in to command the Support Company. The first outing for his 54mm British.

I took part in a great session playing Toms' The Information Game' - a military training game around modern (as in current) intelligence gathering and assessment. It has aspects of cyber and data management, so a bit coals to Newcastle for me, but very interesting to see how to game these non kinetic activities. I think we've found the target (finally).  

Graham ran an intro session for his new RCW rules ' It Rolls for Ivan', featuring lots of cavalry and a huge armoured train with lots of flags.

John C put on a game around mid 2022 operations in Ukraine using the current Fort Leavenworth tactical microarmour rules. A Russian company(+) vs a Ukrainian platoon(+). The rules 'bear a very strong resemblance' to Fistful of TOWs, albeit with weapons effectiveness data based on current intelligence. 

Along with his naval game, Mark F put on a Vietnam session, featuring the Australians. 

And Dave Burden put on one of the products of his PhD work on wargaming urban warfare, WW2 street fighting with 'Rubble Town'.

I took part in one of Russells ever cheery nuclear war planning games in the 'Wintex-75' series, set in the mid 1970s. This time we were the BBC editorial team tasked with coming up for the programming for the post attack 72 hour TV broadcasting loop, which involved a lot of cutting up of copies of the Radio Times. I was head of childrens programming, and managed to fit in Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. We also managed to slip in an episode of 'Survivors', albeit the cheery Xmas edition, as well as repeats of the 1966 World Cup.

I ran my One Hour WW2 variant, with the Leshnov 1941 scenario. Here 12th Tank Division bravely assaults Leshnov.

Although sadly things didn't go quite as well for the rest of 8th Mechanised Corps as they were pocketed by 11th Panzer Division.

Finally I went along to Chris Ks session presenting the latest version of NQM. I'd already had a bit of a preview when I went down to Wellingborough to visit him. I was very pleased to see my suggestion of ammo depletion on a '6' had made it into the rules, so much more satisfactory for the firing player than depletion on a '1', and it has some vague real world justification that all those hits are because you've used up your ammo. I claim no great originality as the rule was originally in Victory Games excellent 'Hells Highway'.

Chris demonstrated the game with a few turns of a Soviet Army level assault vs a position defended by a Panzer Corps in 1943. It ended up involving every player in the room (well over a dozen people).

That was a great weekend, very enjoyable and a fabulous new venue which I hope we will return to in the future. As always it was great to catch up with people, and also to watch and play lots of interesting games.