Operation Husky – D-Day. Baker company, Duke of Buckingham's Own
In Scanario 1, 1 Platoon were to capture a bridge across a river on the road that links the landing sites to the paras near Syracuse. This went very well. The Italians were there to control flow of traffic, rather than any meaningful defence; the picture being somewhat confused. There were 4 sandbag positions – one at each corner, two with rifle bases (about 3 men each) and 2 with the LMGs. A squad of 4 or so were on the bridge it's self. A bunch of organised hairy arsed Tommies rushing out of the treeline soon had them overwhelmed and driven off.
The British then reorganised themselves for the defence of the bridge (This Scenario). The other 2 Italian platoons came back and counterattacked. This is where it all went wrong.
3 problems
*My cards and dice ran perfectly. These early games are not supposed to decimate the British, I'm GM'ing a campaign, and I got the sort of luck I usually can only dream of AS A PLAYER. As the GM I didn't want a fantastic Axis win!
*Sunjester got his tactics wrong. This is partly attributed to new rules, so he did things that would have been obvious not to do on the ground. It didn't help him that approx 1/5 of the board was a tomato field. Forget those things you put in grow bags on the patio- commercial Sicilian tomato plants are densely planted, and grow up to 6 meters!
*Nobody seems quite sure how Italian infantry sections work. We know a platoon is 2 x 10 men, with 4 MG, but actual use descriptions are a bit thin on the ground. I was using them like the British, so all 5 bases in a section (3 rifle bases and 2 MG) worked together. That's pretty devastating in close assault, plus I could lay down an awful lot of fire.
So I went away, taking his suggestions in hand, and asked some questions here on TMP, (and actually got some useful responses!)
- The game is card driven for activation. The British activate a section on 1 card, 2 Rifle and 1 MG bases. The view is that this is a bit OTT for the Italians – their sections being twice the size would be more difficult to co-ordinate. The MGs now have their own card, so activate separately to their rifles, unless activated by a leader as their 2nd order.
-MGs are not allowed to Close Assault.
We replayed the defence the following week, and it was a lot tighter.
The Italians used the tomato plants to try and get close to the bridge, and also to swing round the east side.
The battle flowed back and forth, with Sunjester managing to pull a distinctly bullied section out of the way on his right (the east) in the nick of time, and shore up his eastern end. Eventually the Italians started to flag, but not before doing some damage. It felt that I was unlikely to actually get to the bridge, and as it was so late, we called a halt.
In fact it went on til 1 in the morning, we were so engrossed! This time there were still casualties, but a reasonable amount, and some of them were just 'froze under fire' rather than actual deaths.
