Battle Report - Flames of War Italy

Hello Folks,

So back after a bit of a break, I had to make a work trip down to Colombia so missed out on gaming for a bit. Getting back into the swing of things now.

The weekly Wednesday wargaming started up again yesterday. Serge wanted to do some Flames of War battles in Italy, so we decided to use Fortress Italy, and Road to Rome, along with the mountains he created for the infantry aces campaign awhile back.

I went for an Indian Rifle Company with 2 platoons of Gurhkas, 6 tubes of mortars, a carrier platoons, and some American Tanks and Tank Destroyers in support. Serge had a Fallschimjager company, with 2 platoons of infantry, 2 machine gun platoons, some 88s and Pak40s, and a few other bits. I was going to put the lists up as usual, but I forgot to bring the German one and got lazy and decided to just leave it out.

So as you can see from the picture the mountains are quite large, we decided they would be very difficult for vehicles. Mission wise it seemed good to pick on that seemed appropriate for this type of mission so we went for dust up. I won the roll to deploy first so got to choose my table quater, and as you can see I choose the big hill so I could control the crest. I put one platoon of infantry on the far side to dig in and defend the objective, mortars on the down slope with observers along the ridge to fire in safety, and the other infantry to run down the side of the mountain, and then attack over. The Indian companies are all mountaineers so that would really help me. This left the Germans kind of stuck in the valley floor, which turned out to be allot more important then I would have thought.

Everything else was in reserve.

This mission is a meeting engagement, so you can't fire artillery on the first turn. With that in mind I just dug in with most of my guys, successfully, and then moved up my other platoon t the double to get into attack position.

The Germans advanced with the valley floor platoon, and tried to dig in with the rest, but they had bad luck and failed. They also tried smoking my mortar observer thinking I just had one, and not realizing there was 3.

On my turn I took my chance to fire a bombardment while the German Paras were all clumped up in the valley, and this turned out to be fairly decisive. They lost close to half a dozen teams I believe and had some pins. I kept moving up with my other platoon, and the German sniper tried to harass them but with no effect.

Next turn is just more of the same, we both have 1 platoons getting set up to assault, and some mortars hammering the rest. The difference being that all my stuff was dug in that the Germans could fire at due to the ridge line, so they were far less effective then me.

The action started to pick up the following turn, my infantry platoon was now in range to assault the German position along the ridge. My idea was to clear out some of the AT assests there, without getting exposed to to much defensive fire. Basically trying to pick the platoon apart over a few turns, rather then trying for 1 decisive assault. This is because you need to pin and smoke to get that and I never had the resources. So I assaulted such that only 3 German teams were in range, and tried to limit the defensive fire as best I could. They got 12 dice in the end, but only rolled 3 of the 5 hits needed to stop the assault. I lost one team, but killed all 3 in range. Due to the Indian War Cry special rule, the Germans failed their attempt to counter attack, so I dropped back behind the ridge. The Germans kept pushing forward for their own assault, I had the same number of dice for defensive fire. But rolled twice as many hits, which stopped the assault from going in and killed a few teams.

The sniper by now had re-deployed to fire on my mortar teams, and so far has killed one of them, loosing me the double wide temple/re-roll option. But I am passing my tests to unpin so it's not that bad.

On my next turn I got my reserve and brought in some tanks. My mortars fired on the German mortars, who were not dug in, and were part of the valley floor infantry platoon, killing 2 of them. This left that platoon needing a platoon morale check which they failed. In the assault phase I launched another picking attack on the German ridge to take out the last Pak40 and another infantry team or two. This worked exactly the same as before killing a few and they failed to counter due to the war cry forcing a re-roll. At this point Serge conceded that there was no way for the Germans to win, and although they could play for a draw, it was starting to look unlikely so we called it there.

In the end the Germans suffered from a run of bad luck, I never offered a Beer so that is perhaps the cause of that. But also I think our table had allot of terrain, but none of it offered concealment for infantry teams, so there was a huge advantage for whoever got to control the ridge. Which in thhis case was me. Still I found it to be quite an interesting game, and the big hills are a bit different then normal so that makes it fun.

Hope you enjoyed it, let me know what you thought. I broke my phone in Colombian so had to get a new one. I am still getting sued to how the camera works on this new beast, so quality may suffer for awhile. I have been getting over the flu as well, but hopefully will get some more painting done over the weekend as well.

Thanks;
Mike