Westerplatte, September 1939

 Another Friday outing to Tapton and this time Tim laid on the Battle of Westerplatte, the first significant engagement of WW2 in September 1939 when the Germans occupied Danzig and attacked the Polish naval depot just outside the city. We've actually done this a couple of times before using the excellent Postcard Game of the battle, but this time it was the full monty in 54mm.

The field of operations. The Westerplatte peninsular is the cloth bits, the Danzig canal and basin is delineated by the white masking tape (and has a big battleship floating in it) while the Baltic is on the far side of the peninsular.

The Schleswig Holstein, which had the distinction of firing the first shots of of WW2, if you don't count the prisoners murdered by the Germans to manufacture a border incident. This is a plastic kit acquired for the princely sum of £1 on a Bring and Buy.

And the destroyer G196 which is floating around the Baltic. This is mainly made of balsa wood with various bits from the spares box.

The German attack was made from the east, so this was our baseline. The Germans were Lloyd (commanding the SS militia), Mark (commanding the warships), John (commanding an Army assault pioneer battalion), Pete (commanding the Army heavy artillery, Luftwaffe and logistics) and myself playing Oberleutnant Henningson, commanding a battalion of Marine infantry.

Naturally there were lots of big toys in play. A fleet of Stukas flying over the assault pioneers (Britains Deetal figures). The Stukas are Airfix and Revell.

Here is my Marine Shock Battalion, three rifle companies, a heavy weapons company and battalion HQ. G196 parked alongside for scale. A mixture of plastic figures from various manufacturers in jazzy naval infantry colours.

Tim briefs the assembled multitude. The Poles were commanded by Simon and Stuart, and their forces all deployed hidden.

We each had individual briefings with specific personal objectives which introduced a role playing element. We were allocated two objectives and had to come up with a third one ourselves. Mine were:

1.Ensure Westerplatte is rapidly captured

2.Die heroically leading your men(!)

3.And I added, lead at least one close assault, which I thought tied in well with the second one.

We had a bit of a team planning session, and broadly I was the left flank, the SS the right flank and the engineers followed up the SS. The intention was that I'd tie up the defenders frontally while the SS and engineers tried to punch through on the right flank. Well lets see how that went.

I put my guys on a in a wedge across the road, with one company leading. Each company was allocated one of the battalion MG platoons and the mortar platoon followed up waiting to deploy. Naturally I accompanied the lead company, given my personal objectives.

The SS went in a tight formation up the other road. I hope the Poles don't have any artillery! They also had an armoured car company attached, with jazzy Steyr 8 wheeler armoured cars plastered in SS insignia. Both custom 3D print jobs. The armoured cars went tearing off up the road, typical early war SS lunacy.

The appearance of the armoured cars prompted a battery of Polish 37mm AT guns to open fire. This in turn prompted a response from the Schleswig Holstein, who found the short range flat trajectory firing quite hard. Matchsticks ended up scattered all over the table, except in the offending battery position.

The Luftwaffe also had a go, to little effect. It was quite a small target. Having knocked out one of the armoured cars, the AT gun switched its attention to the Schleswig! it scored some hits but the shells just bounced off the 8" belt armour.

The Army pioneers had a few failed command rolls so their advance was a bit tentative. They followed the SS up the road.

General view after a few turns. Both the Marines and SS are well up with one of the armoured cars visibly burning on the road. So far we've located the AT gun and a rifle company and AT rifle in the wood just next to the railway. My heavy weapons company is hosing them down to cover the infantry advance. 

The Stukas finally scored a direct hit on the AT guns!

This was followed up by a heroic close assault to clear the position, led by the Oberleutnant. Well that is one objective anyway. Hilariously the men on each side of him were shot down in the attack, but the Lt survived. You can just see a few Poles running away in the woods ahead, while a strong position has popped up in the sandbag line. 

One of my MG platoons (you can see the white trousers of the crew) has lagged behind providing covering fire. The Ambulance is dealing with some of the casualties. Tim borrowed my casevac/resupply mechanism from One Hour WW2 as it is fun but simple addition and an excuse to field some ambulances.

The assault company reorganised on the objective and the Lt led another fresh company off down the railway line. Mortar and MG fire had whittled away the central defences, knocking out the Polish heavy MGs, but annoyingly the Poles in the woods ran away again before we could attack them.

The SS were meanwhile trying to repair the damaged armoured cars and get them going again and the Army engineers caught up with them while dong this. The SS infantry went right flanking along the beach and lost a few men to long range Polish fire.

The main bunker line was now in view, but a series of lucky artillery, air, naval gunfire and mortar strikes seriously weakened the defenders. My guys had made it to the first of the railway warehouses and outflanked the central redoubt.

The engineers were now pushing up the railway line supported by the SS armoured cars and the SS infantry had made it to the buildings behind the flank of the bunker line. Faced with the position collapsing on both flanks, the Polish commander decided to surrender to avoid further bloodshed.

And with that, the game was over, Westerplatte had fallen!

We totted up the objective points, and as might be expected, I came fairly low down the pecking order. I'd singularly failed to get myself killed, despite try and ng very hard. The surprise winner was the SS Sturmbahnfuhrer who had wisely tagged a film crew along with his SS militia rabble, and naturally they siezed all the glory.

That was really good fun, the RPG lite elements really added to the game, and we got to both play with Tims lovely 54mm toys and fire lots and lots of matchsticks.