Stalingrad 42 Breakout Group Zhuravlev

[Plain Ian]

Turn back from Mike. Looks like he spent about 5 minutes on it.   VP chart first.



No surprise here. Lets look at breakdown.



Russian losses in men were the lowest for quite a few turns and only 18 German men lost. Map next.



Not many German moves. Mostly artillery and only one assault against the 650th Sep Tank Bn? No assaults on Op Gp Zhuravlev or any of the flanking armour? 

So no new pocket formed but Op Gp Zhuravlev will have to move one hex ZOC to ZOC. Although 62nd Army HQ is out of command supply is reasonable with most of the armour in the north having full supply. Slightly different in the south where most of the units are Low Supply and have not managed to recover from disruption. 
No air available but most of my artillery is available again.

However its pretty clear Mike is back on auto pilot. Do I poke him with a stick for the last few turns or.....



Will have a think about it.

[Plain Ian]

Sorry war is over. message sent to Mike. He is a very competent player. 

I may bore you all later with a review of my game. What went wrong, what to do better etc.

[Plain Ian]

Mike has sent me his password so I've looked at his final positions. 

This is his position at the start of Turn 24. Starting in the south.



As I suspected most of his units in the south are weak and high fatigue. South of Manoylin he has a few well rested units of decent strength. North east of this is a sea of red fatigued fairly weak units, although he does have a fresh unit 1./Pio Btl 113 which he has possibly brought down from the north. 



And this is why we play PzC. A sea of red high fatigued units. No invincible army about to push me back to the start line. In fact apart from Operational Group Zhuravlev my units are comparatively fresh compared to his units. 
His forces at Verkne Buzinovka are slightly better off in fatigue but he has obviously kept the reinforcements to a minimum.

The high fatigue is due to quite a few factors. Mike has kept the fighting going over 2 days and I don't think he rested much. Plus he has kept his units fighting as single individual companies. In all the map I can only see two units with combined companies and that is in stack F. I'm not sure I would use this tactic. I would have tried to tidy up the battlefield and combine units if possible even if this meant slowing down the battle? However Mike's deci
sion to fight as companies has worked I guess?



In the north Mike has garrisoned Tysimlovskiy and has quite a few units resting at Svechinkovskiy. I'm not sure how long some of them have been here. It can't have been long. North of Verkne-Buzinovka he has fresher units and some Flak units which clearly have been brought across from the Svechinkovskiy area.

[ComradeP]

Thanks for another great AAR Plain Ian.

The playing "like there's no tomorrow" that tends to happen in scenarios leads to completely burnt out units at the end, but your opponent didn't seem to do any gamey stuff.

The Soviet inability to break down units is a major handicap on multiple levels, as it means you need more units to hold the frontline and a single Disrupted result disrupts a battalion instead of a company (or two).

It takes a while for A/B quality German units to drop in quality enough for the Soviets to be able to attack them without suffering serious losses, and it seems there was a tipping point where the pocket shrank more quickly than you could keep up with through the relief effort. Regardless of the overall balance, it looks like a nice scenario.

[Xaver]

Great AAR, this is maybe one of the best scens you can find in PzC if you like have all kind of situations in a not big scen.... both sides attack, both sides defend... but the negative point for soviet player is that attack means open a lot his flanks (north in the east sperhead and west in the push from the south) when german player can benefict from a retreat to the rear waiting soviets expose to much spearheads flanks.

Is true as you say ComradeP that soviets suffer from the lack of unit numbers (battalion lacks flexibility to deal with flanks in continuous expansion when their attacks are successfull in direction to the pocket) and counter to this problem needs time, good planning, better execution and a bit of luck... i refer that as soviet more important than conect with the pocket fast from south is destroy the maximun number of german units on the flanks to prevent a late counter over the disperse soviet defenses in the flank, in the east spearhead is practically impossible hunt enemy units if german player decide simple delay and not stop the attack waiting to use his forces to cut spearhead.

On this kind of scens some kind of split for soviet units help balance this to help soviet player attack more free without need search and destroy german flank units... maybe split in 2 a battalion could be enough.

[Plain Ian]

Thanks Comrade P and Xaver. Good comments as always.

I probably put more into the AAR than I do playing the games. I'm still looking for the perfect way to show moves and results in PzC.

Mike played a pretty straight forward game with no gamey tactics. My plan was ok I suppose but I carried it out badly. The attack up the Liska valley did eventually pay off but only late on near the end of the game. I should have started collapsing the pocket more quickly.

I think what killed my game was not strategy but tactics. I did not advance quickly enough and play ruthlessly enough at the start. As Xaver says the Russian must eliminate whole German units at every opportunity and I didn't do that. 

The one strategic mistake I made was not subordinating everything to 62nd Army HQ on the first midnight turn.

The talk about allowing the Russian to breakdown was interesting and early to mid game I was in total agreement. How can you advance and cover flanks with 9-12 mobile units in a Tank Corps? 

The Russian KV1/T-34 units in the Tank Bde's are actually quite large and breaking them down into half sized units would be nice. However that would make them too flexible and the Russians could run these things all over the map as long as they weren't Low Fuel. So I would rule this out even though that would level out the size of armoured units on both sides. I would consider allowing the Motorized rifle Bn's in the Tank Brigades (only) to split so that theoretically they each can support one of the armoured units in the tank Brigade? 

However......by game end I'm coming around to the idea that the Russian shouldn't be allowed to break down. I eventually did manage to a significant advance north and west with the resources I had. A better player probably could have manged quicker and better?