Aachen - West Wall Battle

[Dan Caviness]

Hello Jason:

There are some issues with the Axis artillery available for the Aachen West Wall scenario.
While I can defend their presence, because they were there, I may have overcooked it a bit.
The Germans even had two rail guns chime in from time to time.
But while their artillery was massive, the same late war issues plaguing them everywhere was starting to reduce it's effectiveness. Artillery men and AA men in the Wehrmacht by this point of the war were mostly teenagers and old men pressed into service.

That artillery is certainly the most bestusus weapon the Germans had in this fight.
Historically, the shelling many of them got here was worse than D Day.
Their words, not mine.

Two of the four Yank Medal Of Honor winners during the Battle of Aachen did it by crawling through that artillery fire to directly assault pillboxes and/or bunkers that housed artillery. One paid with his life for the Honor. Both knew the German artillery was killing them.

I see you've conquered Aachen handily.
It's not a sea of rubble, so you can use the roads.
By the end of this battle, Aachen was very much indeed a sea of rubble.
Which was a given, as any town or village or city the Germans made a serious stand in was going to be demolished.

Yank engineers inside the city of Aachen, fighting house to house using the "mousehole" technique decided they wanted to project some firepower. Germans kept coming up behind them through the sewer lines in the city. The engineers were fighting both ahead and behind their positions. They had an Aachen trolley car available, parked on the tracks.

They proceeded to pack it with over a ton of explosives, lit the fuse, and sent the trolley car down the hill towards the German bunker complex that was deviling them. They designated this the "V-113 vengeance weapon". The Germans who survived came out and surrendered.

Surprisingly, this type of warfare never really caught on, the paucity of trolley cars available no doubt effecting it's popularity.

Regards,

Old Man Dan