Tigers at Minsk 4 - Tigers at Minsk!

 After the great excitement of the 1000th Blog post, we continue our journey with Norm Smiths "Tigers at Minsk".  This scenario is the fourth in the Tigers at Minsk rules and covers 5th Panzer Division during Operation Bagration and is I guess where the title for the rules comes from in the first place.

 I wanted another game to try out my modifications and this one is rather bigger than its predecessors. For this I'll treat artillery fire as hitting every unit in the hex (it already does aginst vehicular targets), which might make it a bit more lethal, assuming the targets are silly enough to bunch up in the first place. 

Battlefield from the west. Apologies for the sharp contrast of sun and shadow in the pictures, but it was a sunny day, it does improve as the sun moves. 

The Germans have to stop the Russians from occupying two hexes of the hill (left) and taking the road junction (right) within 70 minutes. If at any point the Russians hold these, they win. The terrain is woods, buildings, a hill and one hex has a 'tree line' it which I'm treating as a tall hedge.

And what a horde of Russians.... 3 x T34/85, 3 x T34/76, an SU 76 and an SU 152, plus seven rifle sections and an artillery stonk. They also have infantry smoke, Molotov cocktails (on a 3 or less) and a preliminary smoke screen of three hexes on their baseline. These are from 3rd Guards Mech Corps so I'll treat them as average for morale. With 15 units on an eight hex front this is going to be a bit of a meat grinder.

The defenders look surprisingly similar to KG Sievers. 4 x Panzergrenadier sections and an HMG, but this time they are supported by 2 x Tiger 1s, a Pz IV and a Pak 40. They also have panzerfausts available (on a 4 or less). In my head these are actually rifle platoons and sections of 2-3 tanks/heavy weapons. The Germans also have an entrenchment and two minefields, and set up in the bottom four rows, so everyone is going to be in action pretty quickly.

In these more tactical games, setting up a defence requires some thought, particularly given the firing arc restrictions on AFVs and AT guns. In the end I decided to focus on defending the town, so most of the infantry were there, including one unit dug into the objective road junction. I decided the hill was expendable but wanted to make the Russians pay for it so I put one infantry unit in a reverse slope defence, but I also wanted make sure the entire front was covered with fire to prevent an early Russian dash up the hill out of sight.

I sighted most of the tanks and the AT gun to fire down 'keyholes', so they were protected from flank attack and could avoid being overwhelmed by the enemy. The one exception was the Tiger on the hill, which was in such a dominating position it just had to be done. Its flanks were fairly secure as it had tanks and infantry and/or ATs guns on either side. I sited the minefields around approaches to the objective hex, even though they aren't particularly powerful in game terms (stun or pin on a 4+) they are still a deterrent.

The defence is necessarily quite extended, so most units are going to be making command rolls. For both sides I'll use a commander figure to indicate the focus of command. 

Having stacked the German defences around the town so much, the obvious Russian target was the hill, and they deployed their smoke to cover an advance on the (German) left. There is such a good approach route through woods from the north to the town that I had to put a probe down there too, so one smoke went there. Four tanks (two of each type) advanced on the left, supported by two infantry, one of which laid more smoke, while two infantry advanced on the right through the woods and smoke. 

I wedged both the assault guns between the poplar tree line and the woods, so they are hidden from the Tiger on the hill but can blast the German infantry/MG position around the church. 

I kept three squads and two tanks in reserve offtable, as you never know what might happen!

tbh the assault could have gone a bit better! I did manage to pin some of the Germans around the church, and two Russian infantry and the observer made it into the buildings on the far left only to go out of command. The columns of smoke tell their own tale however as the Tigers and Pak 40s blew the Russian tanks apart. I did manage to get some hits on the Tiger, but they just bounced off, I didn't even get a stun. The Russians were a bit unfortunate with the kill rolls, but three Russian tanks down already, ouch.

In the next couple of turns the massacre continued (you can see the pile of dead Russian tanks and infantry off to the left). I did manage to stun the Pz IV over on the left flank and even called in an artillery stonk on the church, which overshot and landed on the unit on the crossroads, while the firefight for the church remained fairly even.

I pushed the SU152 and the SU76 through the tree line and brought on the reserve T34s. The Pak 40 picked off the SU76 but the stunned Pz IV couldn't fire and the Tiger hit one of the T34s, but just stunned it. Most of the Russian smoke had dispersed by now, but some hung around by the woods on the right. 

The next couple of turns saw a change of fortunes, sadly it looks like I forgot to take a couple of photos in all the excitement. The Pz IV failed to rally from being stunned, the SU152 pinned and then knocked out the Pak 40 (I'm making AFVs roll a to hit for HE fire) and in a shock development, the last T34/85 finally knocked out the Tiger on the hill! I'm sorry there isn't  photo of it bursting into flames. Perhaps things were going the Russians way a bit more now, although it had cost them seven of their eight morale chips.

The Russian reserve infantry pushed aggressively down the left flank and there wasn't anything the Germans could do about it.

The massed Russian tanks knocked out the stunned Pz IVs (you can just see the smoke from them burning) and then rolled over the hill. Their supporting Russian infantry close assaulted the Panzergrenadiers and drove them off pinned. All those explosions are a Russian air strike (random event), the Germans rolled up another minefield as their random event and put it on the road hex (just visible bottom right). The Germans have now lost three units and have two morale chips left.

The Russians managed to overrun the pinned Panzergrenadiers but infantry fire from the town pinned the Russians infantry on the hill. The Germans began to relocate - I had completely forgotten until a few turns ago that vehicles only move in straight lines, so the last Tiger very, very carefully pulled back. Although it may not look it, it is screened from the Russians on the hill by the building hexes (they fill the entire hex for LOS purposes).

And then suddenly - it all fell apart. The Tiger moved into a covered firing position covering the road junction, but the German infantry managed to finish off one, then another Russian infantry. This triggered not one, but two morale checks, and as various Russian units retreated offtable, even more morale checks until suddenly the Russians were in headlong flight and the town was saved with six minutes left on the game clock.

The final tally of lost or retreated units. Four German and no less than 13 Russian.

That was really good fun, and with a longer and larger game gave me a much better understanding of how things are supposed to hang together, and I discovered more things I'd been doing wrong which made more sense in the bigger context. The minor modifications I'd made worked fine, and it was an interesting and thought provoking scenario with plenty of jeopardy for both sides and some very interesting swings in the position. At various points I thought one side or the other was doomed, but it all came down the last few minutes. 

Small games are always going to be a bit luck dependant, but in this larger scenario actually felt like your decisions had a major influence on the outcome too. For a moment there it looked like the Russians were gong to pull it off, and then it just fell to bits under the pressure. Great stuff, I'll come back to these rules at some point in the future but in the meantime I have another project which I will share shortly.