"In the shadow of the hill" round 1!

[noob]

SPOILER ALERT !!!

Talkabout a game of two halves, the first half i was congratulating myself on taking the Les Duanes with minimal casualties, the second half i was praying for the game to end !!!

As i had never played Pecks before i didn't try and second guess with my pre planned artillery strikes, so i dumped them on the TO's, and consequently hit empty space with over 500 rounds of high calibre HE hitting empty space, so my opponent was going to have to be pretty bad to not get a result out of this after such a let off, however he wasn't, in fact he placed one AT gun in such a good spot that it totally screwed up my armor advance and therefore their ability to effectively support my infantry, in fact it got so bad that i was forced to do a "Dirty Dozen" type move with two squads in jeeps by running a smoky gauntlet up the road to get behind the AT gun, leap out and try and knock it out with grenades, unfortunatley that didn't work so i just ate AP for the rest of the game :(

However i did learn a valuable lesson, always keep some off map HE in reserve, if i had just one of the three 8Imm off map mortar barrages available i could of taken out that gun, which would of changed things for the better, but as it was i didn't, so i paid the ineviatable price.

This scenario definately gives you a feel for how effective the German MG's and SMG's were compared to the Brit equivalents, everytime i heard the rasp of an MG42 i just shuddered as another couple of men went down, and another squad became rattled.

One thing in my favor was the awesome ability of the Churchill to eat Pak 40 rounds, i only actually had two tanks destroyed, and one of them was a sneakily placed Shrek team (it got one of the two 95mm HE chuckers which are gold in this scenario), the rest just sustained damage and backed off, so thanks to the Churchills for not making this into a loss for me.

Anyway i'm happy taking a draw out of this, a fair result considering my opponent had no mobile armor, so if it had been a battle in an operational context i would of fallen back to the farm to lick my wounds and called a ceasefire which would of been accepted.

I must point out that i bulked up against Les Duanes and my attack on Horseshoe wood was a feint to pin units there, my plan was to use the main force to roll past Les Duanes then turn left to the woods to out flank them, but this was a total failure due to the excellent resistance after Les Duanes.

So in conclusion i would like too congratulate my opponent Pecks for a superb defence, the key being that he didn't try and defend Les Duanes, thus letting me move into a terrible kill zone beyond it, and he avoided my artillery, and i mean ALL of it :(

Excellent game, i love CM !!! and congratulations to Pete Wernam for making such a good scenario,

p.s I am going to use this map and more by Pete in a Buron H2H CM operation i am building.

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One more thing, i'd like to compliment Raz on the structure of this tourney, becuase as i failed to get a win i am now under more pressure to get a win with the Axis when i come to play them, which could effect my tactics considerably, so this tourney has an "operational" feel to it you don't get in others, in fact it's given me some ideas for something in the future to do with my operational system.