Finishing a scenario on April Fool's Day invariably will raise a question about the AAR and the results. This one really did end up as a German victory, trust me!!

The Operation Mars scenarios seem to be dedicated to the proposition that the dead pile of Soviet Union units can NEVER be too high. That does not mean that they aren't interesting. In this one, as in the other Grediakino scenarios, a large Guards unit with substantial armor support attempts to take over the town of Grediakino from a mixed force of Germans. The Germans can (and do) dig in in a semicircle covering the immediate vicinity of the town and the Soviets, given the short (17 turn) scenario are compelled to attack straight at the town. The only positives for the Soviets are that the approach to the German picket line will be screened by heavy snow and that once the units can see each other the Soviets really do have a LOT of artillery.

The German picket line is loaded with infantry/HMG stacks and one dug in StuG and the Soviets let their Penal troops advance and take fire while their Guards lag behind. The penal troops are, of course, decimated but manage enough decent morale throws to get into assault with the picket line, permitting the Guards to infiltrate beyond the picket line to the town itself. At the same time their armored thrust swoops in from the west to overwhelm the StuG before being hammered themselves.

At this point the Soviet commander is feeling pretty good with his situation. He has crushed some of the German armor, he has his troops passing through the picket line and the town is about to be invested as well. But (readers of my AAR's know that the other shoe is about to drop), at this point, the German picket line throws off the lightly armed penal troops which had tied them up and the Guards are trapped between the Scylla of the town and the Charybdis of the picket line. Shortly 40+ steps are in the dead pile and the Germans feel comfortable that the Soviets cannot see a situation where they can capture Grediakino.

At turn 14, however, the Germans have lost 12 steps and have a severely dented picket line. The Soviets spend the last hour of the scenario firing artillery at the picket line but cannot cause enough losses to get to get to a draw.

I give it a 2 because as Grediakino "I" there are three others in Tank Battles, each one resembles this one. The situation is interesting because the challenge to the Soviets is quite high but the chance to gain a draw and bleed the Germans is real. Red Warriors deals with the situation mroe reasonably by looking at all four of them together and forces both sides to consider their total resources rather than to pursue a bloodletting right off the bat.