Breakout

Yesterday's game was a snapshot of the Anzio breakout, May 1944, as run by Oriskany Jim under Battlegroup rules. Like Mark Ritchie's Tactical Combat, these are one-to-one rules, but a little more abstracted. Like Seven Days to the River Rhine, there is an emphasis on pinning rather than killing.

My opponent was Devon as the Germans, while Mark and Jim helped me out with the Americans (Mark arrived late and left early). Having placed most of the infantry and artillery to my left and tanks to my right, I took the former and my partners the latter.

The field had very rolling terrain, primarily obscuring but I was able to block Devon's biggest AT guns from seeing my own tanks.

As usual with Jim's tables, very crowded and tons of detail.

US:

A platoon each of Sherman tanks and armored infantry in M3 halftracks
One mortar and two machine gun teams.
A forward air controller with access to a P-38 Lightning.
An artillery observer which I misplaced almost at once among the terrain.
Three artillery pieces - one M3 with 75mm, and two M7 Priests with 105s.
An M10 tank destroyer.

Some American units:

Germans:

Artillery observer team
Four Mk IV panzers
Two StuGs
Panzer Grenadier platoon with MGs and 37mms on their halftracks
37mm flak gun on truck
88mm on cruciform base
Two off-table guns

Some German units:

Each vehicle had seven to ten shells available and we had to choose between high-explosive and armor-piercing.

Loss is based on drawing token when a unit is destroyed;
after a given amount, the side bottles out.
However, it's also possible to draw tokens for mines and airstrikes.

Tracking ammo. Order choices are at the bottom.

Sides must roll for the number of units they can activate - this is based on a roll of dice plus the number of available officers. Shooting requires an observation roll before the attempt to shoot. Players must choose to fire to pin or for effect - and pinning is likelier. Artillery fire always scatters, but given an observer this can be minimized.

Some of the setup - I didn't take many battle photos:

Turn 1: I moved up the board and fired smoke with my artillery - it mostly missed. I scored a direct hit on the 88, with minimum scatter, but you also have to roll for kill or pin, then the opponent gets to save. He saved easily against the pin check. Not much use!

In his turn, the smoke helped a bit as it increased difficulty both to observe and hit - Devon's light AT gun missed a loaded M3 halftrack, but his 88 took out one of my M7 Priests.

Turn 2: With so many rolls to make a single shot "stick," it was hard to do much damage. I kept advancing towards the rail line (and turned over the armor to Mark who arrived at this point). Our M10 tank destroyer killed an STuG, but otherwise little result, while the Germans pinned a few of our units and otherwise selected overwatch for next turn.

My infantry starts to debus.

Turn 3: My dismounts started exchanging fire with his, and dropped artillery on their heads, but much like in our River Rhine games, we mostly pinned each other a lot. Each American squad had a bazooka, so we also got hits on enemy armor, particularly in ...

Turn 4, when the P-38 finally turned up - and then was shot down by multiple rolls of 6 from a truck-mounted flak gun!

Note the mess of exploded tanks - part victims of 5" rockets,
part tank fire, part bazooka from that squad on the left.

In Turn 5, the Germans resurged on my side of the table and ultimately destroyed two squads with a combination of tank fire and infantry close assault. Our tank destroyer narrowly escaped a mine when Devon needed a four on 2d6 - and rolled a three.

All the tanks rolled poorly to fire into
the church - but then I rolled poorly on
my saves!

My infantry behind the hill at top, his infantry and a Pzkw
with 37mm about to take me out. The ACW-style fences,
btw, are cunningly made of toothpicks!

By Turn 6, we'd taken out the 88 and a couple adjacent units, and US armor was pincering the Germans. We were both nearing our "break-points" as determined by token draws, and Devon hit his this turn. While on the tabletop it was certainly an American victory - Germans down to a handful of pinned units and the nearly unhurt American tanks swarming over their left flank - late dice rolls could easily have gone either way. When destroyed, a unit with an officer draws two tokens (numbered 1-5, with break point at 32), and given the mix in the box the Americans would likely have bottled out earlier. As it was, all five American lieutenants survived the game, which also provided a significant bonus to the rolls for how many units we could activate. We never had to make a decision about which units to leave out of a turn, although Devon eventually had so few units that he didn't either.

The Americans also made the mistake of firing about twice as many artillery shells as the rules said we had in stock; a combination of me forgetting to track in later turns and Jim thinking we were using reloading rules (with a couple supply trucks off the table) really should have made the US assault more difficult towards the end.

That and both sides rolled badly a lot. There were times early on when we both should have taken critical losses that would have made a difference - if we had had average rolls. But c'est la guerre, I guess...

A good view of the very nice 88 team.

These rubber wildlife are doubtless traumatized.

Still, an interesting set of rules, a lovely table and miniatures led to a fun game. Sometimes the end result is not the point. At least that's my perspective, but it should be remembered that my side maybe shouldn't have won!

Jim had trouble with his recording; hopefully there will be enough for a video in around three weeks. I  also kept rolling dice when he didn't have the camera on ... sorry.

I am hoping to get in one of Jon Freitag's remote games next. Schedules will have to be juggled... see you next time.