"In the shadow of the hill" round 1!

[Wicked Pete]

Wicked Pete - British - 200pts
WBRP - German - 200pts

Finished with a draw

I believe that my opponent paid off my churchill crews. They accounted for about a quarter of my casaulties do to "friendly fire". Also, I wish I was making this up, my Tommies where scared of thier own guns!! Anytime a tank would fire around them they would start to freak out.
Bad leadership on my part combined with a tough defence by WBRP, resulted in a draw.

WBRP is a great opponent. I look forward to another battle with him down the road. As long as it does not involve the English.

[WBRP]

...and in case it matters [spoiler alert for those who've not completed yet]:
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
British
200 for Les Duanes

German 100 each for Rear Defense West and Rear Defense East

The following are British/STAT/German
192/MEN OK/95
61/KIA/121
64/WIA/83
0/MIA/6
4/Tank lost/1
0/armoured vehicle lost/0
0/other vehicle lost/0

I was surprised he didn't mop me up completely after the 1-2-punch combo of the arty and tanks. My spotters were slow and near hopeless and he slipped out of at least two arty trap after another. Indecision on my part did not help.

[Wicked Pete]

The Tommies just didnt have enough grit to get through the two germans with peashooters to complete the one two punch.

[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.

---

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.

[Pecks]

Pecks vs noob - the other side. First time i played this battle and against all that armour i did not feel i had a prayer to begin with. The arty strikes were ineffective except for Les Duanes which was a bloodbath, which is why noob too it so easily. After that i was playing for time trying to bog down any advance to the next victory point. The feints certainly kept me guessing so kept the second half of the game very interesting.

[noob]

The arty strikes were ineffective except for Les Duanes which was a bloodbath, which is why noob too it so easily.

That's interesting, so my arty strike on Les Duanes was effective then ?, i just assumed it wasn't as i didn't see any dead Axis in any significant numbers when i captured it, well thats made me feel a littel better about my arty as i only wasted half of it not all of it.

So how many men were in Les Duanes when the arty struck, and what level of casualties were sustained ?

As for slowing my advance, well you certainly did that, it was that damn Pak 40 in the hedge that screwed me up, ohh for the want of an off map mortar barrage !!!

[Pecks]

So how many men were in Les Duanes when the arty struck, and what level of casualties were sustained ?

It was only about 20% of my force but I thought the buildings would be good shelter from the mortars. That was a bad mistake as when the buildings collapsed most of my men were crushed. Thats probably why you did not notice many casualties markers.

[Wicked Pete]

I do so love it when people hide in buildings. Its so much easier to kill them.

[spankythamunky]

Allied Major Victory with me as Brits Strange Whispers as the Waffen SS
Very well played and fought on his part, definitely the key to the battle is using the artillery well and being patient letting its do its work.
The other key is keeping your Churchills far enough back, plastering any and everything with fire. the churchills have around 9k rounds of MG ammo, I tried to use as much of that as I possibly could.
The battle for Horseshoe Wood was rough.
p.s. how are you guys getting the file size down to attach? even saving as a jpeg with fraps its still a 3 meg file!

[noob]

Agree with you about the indirect fire, different game for me if i'd used it better.

I use Photobucket to display images in threads, upload the jpg image and copy and paste it's IMG link.