Daniel and I sat down for the second in our "Christmas Battle" series with the lessons of the first play clearly in mind. In this second installment two battalions of Italians (one Blackshirt and one Berseglieri) need to hold one town each against a couple of hordes of Soviets. The problem that became apparent almost immediately is that the Soviets seem to have forgotten to bring along any leaders. On average each Soviet leader had to manage 5-6 platoons each, and that supposed that they would retain their morale and not die.

The Italians are blessed with ample leadership, decent artillery, both on board and off, and a higher morale than the Soviets. As mentioned above the Soviets have a whole bunch of units, tons of steps, some nasty artillery themselves but very few leaders. This made the Italian strategy relatively simple. Wait until the Soviets came into range and then try to disrupt, demoralize or eliminate the leaders (thus the name of the AAR). While I didn't manage to eliminate many of the leaders I did manage to keep the largest force's leaders in a state of near constant panic with repeated artillery strikes and ultimately direct fire. This approach was so effective that the Soviets were not able to bring any significant force to bear on the towns until the game was 3/4 over and even then the forces were small and counterattacks effective in containing their attack. As a matter of fact Daniel had to go through hoops to even have any leaders who were not demoralized who could spot my towns for the artillery.

As you can expect, the Soviets who had moved up without leaders, were unlikely to be able to do anything but to stand and get pounded over and over by Italians with a greater range and the expected losses began piling up. At the 24 turn mark the Italians had lost 3 steps while the Soviets had lost 27 or 28. At that point it became apparent that the Italians could not be shaken from enough town hexes for the Soviets to get to a draw and we called the carnage.

I initially thought this one rated a "2" given the ease with which the Italians were able to hold off the Soviets but upon further consideration I raised it to a "3" since there were multiple Soviet strategies (for example, Daniel split his force into two sections but could have brought his eastern force across to attack the Berseglieri held town and only proceeded southward if he could take that town). In addition, well after it became clear that the Soviets could not win a draw remained quite possible and only the exceptionally good dice for the Italians (and dreadful dice for the Soviets) kept it from happening. Frankly the dice were such that I found myself apologizing for the multiple 2's and 12's on fire missions combined with Daniel's 10's for morale checks and recovery attempts. Between the two of us we had average rolls but mine just happened to be at the right time!