"KG Klink, France, Game 7" Topic

All,

It's 1615 on 15 May 1940, and KG Klink, attached to the 7th Panzer Division, is on the move. The 7th Panzer Division has broken through the French front line and is on the road to Flavion; this morning the division was stymied by French resistance on the main axis of advance, but KG Klink reconnaissance elements discovered an undefended ford of the River Moiste north of the city and seized it. Lt Wehner immediately seized it, and both the French and Colonel Klink dispatched forces to secure it. There followed an extremely intense fight which saw two enemy tanks knocked out, an entire French infantry platoon eliminated in close combat, and four Iron Crosses handed out (including a 1st Class)! Rommel immediately sent his panzer grenadiers streaming into Flavion and his panzers around it, while KG Klink pushed south from its ford, then being ordered to reduce a French strongpoint on Hill 81 on the eastern outskirts of Flavion. Colonel Klink ordered his infantry company commander, 1st Lt Tausch, to take three of his platoons, some heavy weapons, and a section of Stug IIIs and take the hill.

I am playing this game, the seventh of KG Klink's campaign during the Fall of France in 1940, in 10mm, using a mix of Pendraken and Minifigs UK troops and equipment, on a 6' x 4' table, using Great Escape Games' "Iron Cross" rules.

The battlefield, north is up. Hard to see elevation (as I put the hills under the mat), but Hill 81 is at far left, while Hill 37 is at center top right. There is a north-south running dirt road, several patches of woods, three houses (from top to bottom, the yellow house, the gray house, and the red house), numerous cultivated fields (no effect on movement/cover), and a large rubble pile at center (not sure why it's there, but it was in the Skirmish Campaigns scenario book map, so I put it in there, too).

The opposing forces, with French on top and Germans on the bottom. The forces are relatively equal, two or three rifle platoons, a section of AFVs, a mortar, MG, and ATG.

The Stugs move up to the rubble pile (bottom center) and engage French defensive positions atop Hill 81 (top center).

And German mortars and machine-guns (bottom left) pound the French left (top center/right).

But things don't really heat up until the anti-tank guns come out! Here the French 25mm ATG (bottom right) fires on the German Stugs (top left).

And the German PaK-36 (bottom center) pumps rounds into the flank of a French H39 (center top).

To see the whole fight, please check the blog at:
link

I'm looking to play out a few more of these games so that I can close out the Fall of France, I really want to get to the Eastern Front. I hope you enjoyed the batrep, I'm working on more, though the next one will be back to the Cuba Libre blog for more dogfighting. I also have an update on some 6mm WWII stuff I recently completed as well.

V/R,
Jack

Jack, I enjoyed reading and LOOKING too – (10-12mm my favorite WW2 battlescale)!

You have a wonderful terrain kit – it looks great, but I can see the functionality within it too – building models accessible, woods easily opened up if unit placements needed, field areas clearly marked, there's scatter – but nicely defined if for determining LOS.

Nice & Tight!

FlyXwire,

Hey man, thanks, I'm glad you liked it! I'm a big fan of 10mm, just looks right to my eye, army terrain isn't perfect, but light years ahead of where I started! Are you still doing the Tank-on-Tank games with miniatures.

Also, I received an interesting question on one of the forums (why were the French tanks so slow to attack the German Stugs?), and hopefully I provided an interesting answer, which I wanted to share here. So read the batrep first, but then come take a look if you're interested. The reason I'm doing this is because I wish I was adding more tactical analysis like this into the batreps, but I get so focused on getting them written and posted that I'm falling down on that aspect. My response:

1. The French tanks were a mobile reserve, and you don't want to commit your reserves before the action has developed. The German Stugs were in a similar situation, with the caveat that the German commander knew he was going to have to commit them early as his infantry had to attack across open ground and the Stugs were the only units that offered the firepower to ‘shoot them in,' particularly against a nearly equal defending force. But that early committal did not win the battle for the Germans, it almost lost it for them!

2. The French anti-armor capability, while relatively numerous (two light tanks and an ATG), was not particularly capable, so the French commander knew they needed to get close and/or get on the flanks. Therefore the French commander adopted an ambush mentality that would allow the German armor to commit (hopefully overcommit), then pounce once the enemy armor was identified and fixed (as it was by the French 2nd rifle platoon, the Stugs' only alternative to remaining exposed at close range was to reverse, which, because of the close terrain, really meant quitting the fight).

3. The last reason for the French commander to delay committing his tanks to the fight was that it is very difficult in real life to control units once they are committed and engaged, and the rules do a very good job at representing that.
It's the old ideas of getting inside your opponent's OODA loop, forcing him to react to what you're doing rather than doing what he wants to do, and that's exactly what the French commander did.

While the attack by the French 2nd rifle platoon was perhaps a bit too bold, and certainly unlucky (Sgt Wagner's vehicle being able to react and back away from the infantry close assault), it did fix the Stugs to allow the French anti-tank fun to be brought up, which resulted in the destruction of Sgt Wagner's vehicle.

The French 2nd rifle platoon, despite the German 2nd and 4th Platoons' rushed deployment, was still able to threaten the remaining Stug, to the point it had to react to what they (and the French 1st platoon attacking the German 1st Platoon between the gray and yellow houses) were doing, thus staying engaged and being unable to react when the French tanks were ordered forward.

So I wouldn't say the French tanks were slow to respond, I figured they were right on time, coming within a micrometer of defeating the second Stug (one more morale marker would have finished him, or another inch of movement would have put the second French tank on the Stug's flank, which probably would have resulted in his shot penetrating instead of bouncing) which would have forced the German infantry to fall back (all armor KO'ed, two French tanks on the loose).

V/R,
Jack

Jack, I'm still playing our modded version of Tank On Tank, but the last game I hosted was way back in February – (got distracted by Cruel Seas, Medievals, and some black powder era games in the meantime).

TMP link

I have the Iron Cross rules, but have never played them, but they've been scratching your itch, and would like to hear your impression/pointers if you have the chance?

Pretty cool man, lots of fun happening, lots of work done, too.

Regarding Iron Cross (and it's Cold War variant, Seven Days to the River Rhine), the rules are pretty cool. The heart, and the cool part that sets them apart from other rules, is the activation system, and it's fantastic! I really love how you can use it to differentiate between different force capabilities ('green' vs 'veteran,' for example), and how you can really push your luck to try to get stuff done, but the opposition always has a chance to break in on your best-laid plans.

Combat is broken down into anti-personnel and anti-tank. The AT combat is pretty conventional, roll to hit, roll to penetrate, see what exactly happened at a pretty granular level, while the AP combat is mostly standard fare, with the exception of the 'convert hits' mechanic, which I'm not really a big fan of. It seems to me that it adds an unnecessary step to AP combat, but maybe I just haven't grasped the nuance of it yet.

Morale and rallying is simple and intertwines well with the activation system, so everything is solid. My only real complaint is regarding playing it solo, where it really took me a long time to finish the game. There's just so much stuff going on, so many decisions to be made and rolled for, that I was pretty mentally exhausted by the end of it. I think the game would go a lot better with another human to share half the load with.

If you've got any specific questions, please let me know.

V/R,
Jack

Jack, thanks for taking the time here to relate your impressions of Cross Of Iron – could you expand some more on your enjoyment/appreciation for its activation system?

Cool, Jack's Back! Great to see another battle report out of you.

FlyXwire,

Hmmm, okay, I'll give a shot at going further than I did above.

So, I like that the turns are interactive, both sides are constantly engaged due to the 'react' mechanism.

When I said "…I really like how you can push your luck…" what I mean is that units can act multiple times in a turn. Depending on how lucky you are, you can get four actions out of a single unit in a single turn, though it's more likely to be two or three. And the other piece of 'pushing your luck' is that if you're spending all those command tokens on activating/trying to activate a single unit, there are a lot of other units that are unable to act that turn, and I'm always a fan of limited resources, finite actions that force the player/commander to focus on what he wants to get done.

And that is what I mean by "…getting inside the opponent's OODA loop…" You're prioritizing where to spend your command tokens in order to carry out your plan, hopefully making the enemy spend his command tokens to react, which 1) takes him out of HIS plan, and 2) makes it harder to activate his units to do what he wants when he has the initiative (because of the accrued command tokens, which make it progressively more difficult to activate a unit).

Another aspect to 'getting inside the OODA loop' is that you can't just sit back and hold onto your command tokens until your opponent runs out of them, then roam around the table for free. First, if the enemy has the initiative and you just sit there and watch, he's going to be shooting at your troops, and as they accrue morale markers they become harder to activate, so you might have a boatload of command tokens but all your units are failing their activation rolls and so you can't get anything done. Second, the opposing player can 'pass' the initiative, in which case you have to spend at least one command token before passing it back, so if you were very aggressive during your initiative and used most of your command tokens, or if he's had the initiative but you've used a bunch of command tokens to react, now you're low and he can actually run you out of command tokens and now HE'S running around the table, free from consequences. If that's not getting inside the other guy's OODA loop, I don't know what is! ;)

I like that the game really pushes you to keep a reserve based on its mechanics, rather than some artificial mechanism within the rules to force it. The way it does this is two-fold:

1) because a single unit can activate multiple times in a single turn, it's quite possible for the enemy commander to push units deep into places you weren't expecting them, so you'd better have units able to respond (and I'm always a big fan of big 'shifts,' dramatic, aggressive maneuver).

2) because, as in real life, units that have been committed and are engaged are very difficult to control, so you'd better have fresh units on hand to be able to do what you want, when you want.

How's that?

V/R,
Jack

TGunner,

Yeah man, glad to ‘see' ya. It's good to be back and posting batreps again, was wondering where all my old buddies have been. What have you been up to, start a blog yet? If not, hurry up! ;)

V/R,
Jack

I'm thinking about doing one for the Flames of War project that I'm doing with my boys. We're doing the Normandy thing with Battlefront so I've been busy painting up some stuff- about 50 points of US and Germans right now. I'll let you know when/if I get it up.

It's great to see you back here at TMP rolling dice and blowing stuff up!

Awesome man, can't wait. And don't sweat it, it's easy, and you don't have to take as many pictures and write as much detail as I do to be interesting. I don't mean that like mine are something to be emulated, I just mean that I spend too much time on my batreps, and it's really not necessary to put that much time in to be worthwhile. Just have fun with it!

And yes, I'm blowing stuff up as quick and as much as I can! I'll post my next batrep, another jet dogfight in Cuba Libre, tomorrow.

V/R,
Jack

Jack, that's an excellent explanation of how/why you like the Iron Cross activation mechanics – "fluidity" in acting/reacting comes to mind.

Thanks for explaining it more for me!

No problem, I always enjoy a discussion on tactics and rules mechanisms.

V/R,
Jack