TF Rose (again)

 As Tim wasn't sure how long Where Seagulls Dare would take in the morning , I'd offered a filler game. After lunch we played the Task Force Rose scenario Id solo played a few weeks earlier. 

As a brief remember, this battle took place in the afternoon of 18 Dec 1944 as 9th Armored Div tried to slow up the German advance on Bastogne. There are numerous scenarios covering this battle, but this one is taken from the CDIV rulebook (US Scenario 5).

Battlefield from the southeast. The main road to Bastogne is the top one. Basically the Germans need to clear it before nightfall. When I played this myself, it was a very tough fight and the Germans only just won. 

I had to accommodate seven players in a scenario with nine combat units! So some people only had one unit, and I appointed formation commanders to run the artillery and logistics (Pete for German and John for US). 

The US did much the same deployment I did, but put the Armored Infantry into the central wood. The Germans however chose to roll on in the North, right across the open, snowy fields. Tim was commanding the veteran 2nd Panzer Div grenadiers and Lloyd the US tanks. 

Tim swarmed the advanced US Stuart company, using the Ridge as cover so they were out of the line of fire of the Armored Infantry (Bish) and veteran 110th Infantry (Russell). The Germans had three units vs two. 

The US fire inflicted  some losses on the Germans, but not many, and the Stuarts fell back to join the Shermans. The Germans got lucky and their Panzers(Anthony) rolled on, straight up the road. Bishs infantry  could see these units now, so it was 5:3. 

Both sides exchanged artillery fire across the valley. 

The Germans rapidly gained fire superiority, the Stuarts were so battered they had to retire before reorganising. This let the remaining Germans cover one of the Panzergrenadier units to close on the town, and although it was fairly shot up in the open, it retained the strength to overrun the Shermans in close combat in the narrow streets of the town, shot in by the other Germans. What a disaster! 

The Panzer steamroller just kept on rolling! Pete managed to juggle the very limited German supply capacity to resupply damaged units and the artillery. 

Both US infantry units now moved to counterattack, but they came in one after the other rather than together. 

The Armored Infantry were wiped out by concentrated fire. This let the Germans concentrate on the Stuarts, who were still reorganising. 

The Stuarts were duly destroyed, and finally the Germans turned their attention to the 110th. The US infantry ran into massive fire and decided it was safer to retire for the evening. 

Well that was a pretty convincing German victory! The players did much better than my solo effort when it went right down to the very last turn. I think a combination of the more dispersed US deployment and effective concentration of the German forces worked well this time, although I'm still puzzled how three German companies managed to attack three entrenched US companies so effectively. The German armour rolled up fairly early I suppose, and I wasn't paying much attention to the dice scores so maybe the US defensive fire was lousy?

Who knows, anyway we finished in plenty of time and it was nice to give the snow boards their first public outing.