Bucha, Ukraine - 27 Feb 2022 - 15mm

The virtual game board engagement of Panzer Leader between myself and @brucelea continues!

So here is where I really start to pay for my overly-aggressive move into the the northern hex of that Tunisian town.

The idea was sound, get heavy armor up into that town and use its defense bonuses to forestall British armor coming down from the northeast against my tentative bridgehead over the wadi.

What wasn’t so sound was how it was executed – putting tanks into urban terrain without infantry support.

There’s a rulebook somewhere, where all t he ghosts of all the great tank generals in all the wars write on page one … never do this!  Never send tanks into cities without infantry support!

Well, this is what happens.

Direct fire from the fifteen Crusader IIIs, at point-blank range, blasts away into the town hex and with a solid roll (and point blank range, and 3-1 advantage in numbers, and upgunned to 6-pounders), actually knocks out that platoon of Tigers.

How can those Crusaders see me?  They have friendly infantry swarming over me (adjacent hex to the south) probably marking the Tigers with colored smoke and flares.   Here they are, boys!  Come and get ‘im!  Shoot straight for once, you tanker pukes!

With the Tigers burning, the close assault then comes in at the end of infantry movement phase.  More bad news, the British infantry is now being supported by a platoon of engineers moving in from the southeast.

This is very, very bad news for my two platoons (ten tanks) of PzKpfw IV/F2s.  And they are put in a very tough position where they are faced with two really shit choices.

Those engineers only have one attack point, but because they are engineers, lend that combined four-unit close assault some very big bonuses.  So, do my Mark IVs counterfire against those engineers in an attempt to save themselves?

Or to they accept the inevitable and go out in a blaze of glory … blasting away at those Crusaders who have now revealed themselves by shooting up those Tigers?

After being too aggressive in moving in here, the German tanks now get too timid, and try to save themselves.

They pun down the engineers, but the three platoons of rifles close assault anyway.  Admittedly it is a weaker assault, but @brucelea rolls well enough where it disperses those two platoons of Mark IVs.

Now the Mark IVs will never get a shot off against those Crusaders.  🙁

THEN both Mark IV platoons will fail their rally checks next turn, allowing the British infantry and Crusaders (who now have them in a north-west crossfire, and they are still dispersed) to pick them off more or less at their leisure.

Definitely a bad day for the Panzerwaffe.

The end of Turn 7, where I zoom out a little so show some seriously dramatic developments in this ongoing battle.

So in the south is the good news for the Germans.  Even though my engineer platoon was dispersed and finally killed, meaning I can’t blow up the bridge in an elegant, professional, “proper” way … I can mass 400 German infantry and simply assault the bridge and try to literally tear it apart with satchel charges and stick grenades and integral 5.0 cm mortars.

It took two turns, and two assaults, and only succeeded because of some good dice on my end (finally) and plenty of smoke screen cover dropped in by the 8.0 cm mortars.

So my 400 men, with plenty of flak, 7.5 cm infantry gun, antitank gun, and mortar support, literally assaulted the bridge twice and finally succeeded in basically burning it down.

One engineer platoon with the proper training and equipment would have been better.  But either way, we finally got the job done.

Up north, things are not going so well for me.  As previously described, the British armoured dragoons have now blown up another platoon of PzKpfw IVs, the last one miraculously rallied and escaped into the woods to the north.  How?  where did those Crusaders go?  They withdrew to the north to cover that platoon of Valentine bridgelayer tanks, which is trundling toward the wadi to lay a second bridge across the wadi to the north.

Remember the victory conditions – the Germans get 20 points for each British bridge destroyed, the British get 20 points for each bridge still across the wadi at the end of Turn 10.  So, if @brucelea can get that second bridge across, the game is tied for bridges and it will come down to  destroyed units (British get 3 points for each German unit destroyed, Germans get 2 points for each British unit destroyed).

But as we see in those northern woods, there has already been a bit of a tank firefight as that last platoon of PzKpfw IV/F2s has tried to get around those Crusaders and put a hole through those Valentine bridge layers.

A close up of that bloodbath in the wadi, where my German schützen infantry finally managed to burn down that bridge.   The bad news is that my panzerkompanie of PzKpfw IIIJs is now trapped on the British side of the wadi, and several platoons are already “dispersed” by Sherman fire pouring in from off screen to the right.

Note where the bridge used to be is a counter showing a burning British tank.  This may not make sense.  Basically, these burning tank counters are not just for bragging rights or decoration, they also effect the properties of that hex (stacking, movement, etc).  Too many wreck counters can actually “clog up” a hex to a certain degree.  So when a bridge is destroyed, a wreck counter is placed there to show the effect of that collapsed metal.

Meanwhile, that stubborn British company of rifles (with bridging engineer support) is still causing trouble in the norther part of the wadi.

The Valentine bridge layer has reached the norther stretch of the wadi!  A new bridge is being thrown across the terrain obstacle!  After a brief window of German victory, it looks like this “Battle of the Bridges” is being tied up again!