The Germans blundered their way through this battle.

A good deal of the initial German forces were placed in the small town to the north, and the rest were on the road to the east of the large city, or in the city proper. I was counting on using the forces on the road as a kind of show of force, hoping that the Russians would veer to the north to capture some desperately needed town squares. As it turned out, this did work, for the Russians were, in my opinion, a bit too afraid of the AT abilities of the Germans. This position was also strengthened by a successful reinforcement die roll within the first six turns. By turn 10 or so, there were three heavy machine guns and four or five platoons entrenched on the road north and east of the town. If the Russians were going to come straight for the big town, they would eat lots of lead.

The Russians actually fought a decent fight. They stayed out of range of my machine guns, used the tanks mostly as a threat, not as cannon fodder, and they kept good order as they took the small town and advanced east of the hill toward the large town. I foolishly tried to extricate my troops from the small town when it would have been better to have them die taking down Russians with them in assaults. The entire garrison was wiped out, except for the major, who did manage to crawl back to the large town and oversee its final defense. I did however, have a good deal of luck in the town, as some of my last few troops (even when demoralized) simply refused to die. This tied up the Russians and bought the Germans time.

The Russians' only real blunder was separating the mortars and a few infantry platoons from the main body of their forces and trying to get them into the woods. Despite the loss of nearly three platoons, a German Kaempfgruppe consisting of five infantry platoons and a STG III was able to rid the woods of their presence, and still limped back to the city ready to fight.

I think by the end of the game, the Russians realized they couldn't get into the large town. Although the Germans had taken more casualties than the Russians, the Russians didn't really have enough juice or time left for urban assaults.

This scenario does pose some interesting situations for the Germans. There were few times when I wanted to be more aggressive, but I had to watch out for the 30 pt bombardments, and I had to think about the speed of those T-34s. I was lucky, though, mostly because of the early reinforcement roll. I doubt my generalship had much to do with this victory.