| Is it "Always divide your force?" or "Never divide your force?" oh... Just remembered... | ||||||||||||||
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This one, the wheels (or treads) fell off the bus. Playing against a skilled and well armed opponent, the Americans, with a highly mobile, combined arms force had to control the town, hills and highway across three boards. The German player set up in the town and on hills very well sited with overlapping fields of fire and use his tanks to actively mark all the victory objectives while moving to positions on the front line. I did not want to attack the town in the center of the entry board so I divided my force into an armor heavy component attacking north of the town, and an infantry heavy component held off board to attack south of the town where there was a fire dead zone in front of the German occupied hills where they could sprint and wait for the right moment to crest the hill and hit the German Right. On my right, the armor heavy column advanced to contact well and bypassed the wadi north of the town and headed to the first set of hills moving along the north edge of the map. At first the advance went well and I was able to get the Shermans into action and was able to take out the German Marder which had a central position in his line. That success aside, I hit a stone wall. The German armor arrived on the next hill and even with smoke I was unable to get any farther. However, this had forced the German commander to start moving some forces from the south to cover the possible break through from the north. At that point I brought the infantry heavy force on my left and got them into the cover of the hill that was the first objective. My opponent at this time had deployed his tanks to the north to hold his left position so this was as good a time as any to hit the infantry positions to the south of the town. Well it didn't work out that well. I botched the initial contact and the German inflicted serious morale losses on me and the infantry was not able to break into or through the German positions. The careful placement of leaders helped my opponent capitalize on every activaction and get in solid first strikes. After about an hour of trying to get forward and concentrate forces on the left and about two hours after initiating my armor strike on the right, the Americans had become combat ineffective and incapable of achieving their objectives so were forced to concede the battle and the battleground to the well dug in and well led Afrika Korps. |
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| 3 Comments |
A succinct and well-written summary of a major action-packed shoot 'em up in the hills of Tunisia.
Thank you sir! I felt like the lessons learned were about concentration of forces. I could have still split up, but not into two equal prongs, neither of which were enough to do the job. This one would be worth playing again sometime.
Happy to switch sides for a rematch -- if they ever let us count repeat plays as the opposite side!