75th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Gaming The Battles)

Turn 3 (Allies):

My son was able to unpin both of his Infantry platoons and continued their advance up the tracks alongside their supporting tank platoons. He marched the Engineer platoon straight up the middle. Both tank platoons hose the sniper closest to them with machine gun fire resulting in the death of one sniper and the other being pinned. Just to really hammer home the point, my son then decided to assault the pinned sniper with the tanks. The sniper didn’t last long.

Turn 3 (German):

With no Allied units either in range (of any revealed units) or line of sight, there was no action. The Germans sit tight and wait the assault.

Turn 4 (Allied):

My son continued his two prong advance and was able to close his tank platoon up to another undiscovered counter. Being brave, he drove a tank over it to find out what it was. It turned out to be a mine and the tank failed its armour check, the mine penetrated the armour and was destroyed. My son wasn’t happy about this but I did point out that a number of tanks were destroyed by mines in the actual battle, so this was at least historically accurate. He did not make the same mistake with the other tank platoon and gave the counter a wide berth. 

The advance also took the tanks into line of sight of the counters that could be the MG nest and Panther turret, so these were placed on the board (marked as N and P respectively on the map).

During the shooting round, my son decided to use one of his two off board mortar strikes, calling in the strike against the infantry dug in around the farm house. This caused no damage but did pin the unit in place. The lead tank fired on one of the MG Nests and my son’s particularly lucky dice rolling came into play (he is very lucky!) and he destroyed a nest.

Turn 4 (German):

The Panther Turret destroyed the second tank from Tank Platoon 1 with a clear shot down the track as the tank advanced up the track.

Turn 5 (Allied):

My son continued pushing forward and his tanks advanced out of the tree line to begin crossing the gap toward the road. This revealed the PaK40 that was stationed at the far end of the road from the house. 

My son decided to use his smoke this round to cover his advance. Tank Platoon 2 direct fired its smoke on the PaK 40 and he called in the second of his mortar strikes to lay a smoke barrage in front of the panther turret and dug in infantry.

Turn 5 (German):

The German units couldn’t see a lot due to some well placed smoke but the MG nest was able to gun down one of the teams in the Engineer platoon. Otherwise, any other German unit that could shoot missed. I guess there was a lot of smoke and dust across the battlefield confusing the defenders!