Battle Report - Firestorm Loraine Campaign Turn 2B Game 1

Yesterday the club continued on with our Firestorm Loraine campaign, this was the second round of games in turn 2. In this round I had to attack the Metz again and go up against the heavy entrenched guns. I was a bit lazy so I just went with the same army I have been using for most of this, this time my firestorm support troops were a platoon of tanks and 1 of heavy artillery.

My German opponent had a mix of Panthers, Panzer IVs, StugGs, Infantry, Artillery, so really just allot of stuff. I don't have the exact lists ready to post this time but you get the idea. We rolled for a mission and got Cauldron which was vetoed and then Hold the Line (or was it no retreat), it's the defensive battle where the defender is in delayed reserves but has 2 ambushes.

Here is our start position, the objectives are between the 2 hills in the back, and behind the trenches and tank obstacles on the right. As you can see I have decided that assaulting engineers in trenches with full panzerfaust is not a great idea so my plan is to bypass that mass and go for the rear. The Germans also have their heavy artillery on the board and the Panthers in ambush. We later realized that the Panzer IVs had forgotten to deploy so they were added later.

First turn I moved up cautiously and sent in the recon to make it hard for the panthers to deploy from ambush in a great position. The Germans fired the artillery and killed a sturat and held back the Panthers for now. As you can see I have elected to keep the heavy guns under smoke for most of the game.

On turn 2 I sent my recon unit in to attack the heavy guns, and was able to take out 2 of them at the cost of only 1 jeep, so no to bad. Meanwhile my tanks crept forward.

In the following turns the Germans deployed the Panthers and then brought up the Panzer IVs. My recon were taken care of by the commanders who decided to suddenly show up.

As you can see the Panthers were giving me quite allot of trouble. I was not having great luck, and my plans to take cover behind the houses back fired as the Germans were able to take advantage of that to avoid firing at my heavily armored jumbos, and instead kill the better gunned 76mm Shermans. The Reluctant Panthers had great luck un-bailing as well which was not great.

Eventually I was able to kill all but 1 of the Panthers, mostly with artillery, but by then almost all of my tank had been destroyed. Still both of the German command tanks had been killed, so there were possibilities if I could some how kill the last Panther and 4 Panzer IVs with 1 command Jumbo and 4 Stuarts.

This was not to be as my commander was surrounded and bailed out, so when I had to make a company morale test there was no one to roll it resulting in a loss due to company breaking. But still was a fun game, perhaps I could have played more conservatively and relied on my heavy artillery to do more work, but that is just not fun. As it turns out one of our allied generals was able to get a victory and captured the important town of Nancy. This puts us just in the lead as we head into the third and final round of the campaign which will have all the German counter attacks. So we will really have to do a good job defending our gains to pull off a draw.

Thanks;
Mike