Battle Report - Flames of War Desert Campaign

Hello,

We had another day of our ongoing Early War Desert Campaign at the club. I did the German attack from Hafid Ridge to Point 202. Oh we are doing operation Battle Axe.

I had an Afrika Corps Panzer Company with an additional free unit of Panzer 3s and another of Panzer 2s. The British had a Crusader company with free Recon and Infantry units. This gave me a pretty hefty advantage to be honest.

This is a night time turn for the campaign so all the games start off in darkness but it will become dawn at some point.

We ended up playing Free for All and I got the first turn. I quickly saw that I had more tanks and mine were veteran so I decided to try and just kill all the vehicles to break company morale. Originally I thought I would also need to get the infantry but turned out the British had just 5 platoons. I spread out on both side, and moved up my infantry to attack the British infantry. I was hoping the Crusaders would come down the middle and get surrounded.

The British moved up to the edge of their range, only a few got to shoot but they managed to kill a tank!

I returned fire without moving and killed 2. I was using storm trooper to keep them at the edge of 24" as that was pretty advantageous for me. I was only able to be hit on a 6 vs 5 for the British, and I had more shots! On the other flank my tanks just sat still and shot up the recon unit. They had fired at my armored cars to no effect and now all died.

Things got into a bit of a shoot slug fest now. With the dark and long range and low fire power for early war weapons kills were not so easy to get. But I loose two thirds of my fire power if a tank moves so had to wait it out.

As the fire fight continued the weight of fire really paid off for me and more and more British tanks were destroyed reducing their ability to fight back. But I still lost a few tanks. But was lucky enough to pass my platoon morale rolls when forced to make them.

Eventually all of the tanks were destroyed except from the commander, who failed his company morale roll, so it was a victory for the Germans! But perhaps not a very exciting one. Luckily I was not forced to go near the Royal Horse Artillery which is very dangerous in direct fire, but not so great at throwing bombardments against tanks in the night.

Maybe not the best report, but that is how she goes sometimes.

Thanks;
Mike