Poland 1939

Full of Christmas spirit our reporter headed East and back six years to Poland in 1939. I dusted off an old “Battlegroup Blitzkrieg” scenario, amended it slightly and served it up for the delectation of Greg and Tony. The game was based on a historical Polish counter-attack at Tomaszow Lubelski which saw the elite Warsaw Armoured Motorized Brigade reinforced by the 1st Light Battalion attacking the troops of the German 4th Light Division. Greg took the armour-heavy Poles and Tony and dug-in Germans. In defiance of the cost-of-living crisis Tony supplied some truly excellent Marks and Spencer mince pies, and I provided warming hot drinks. I wasn’t going to have the heating costing me money!

Tony dug in two sections of infantry covering the centre and north of the table, with a PAK 36 emplaced also covering the exposed centre.

Greg rolled his orders dice and got off to an awful start for the Poles. A double one for orders. Indeed, the opening moves saw a total of five double ones rolled and other low scores which rather stymied the Polish attack. At one stage it looked as if the Germans may begin a counter-attack against the numerically inferior Polish forces on-table. Things picked up marginally for the Poles when their pre-planned 105mm artillery strikes the German positions killing most of an Mg34 team and pinning other troops. Greg’s frustration with the orders finally reached breaking point and he refused to use the allotted blue Peter Pig dice and changed two red dice. The result was 10 orders plus officers...

The main Polish attack seemed to be through the rough ground along the north edge of the table, and the similar terrain to the south.

Tony played a canny game of using suppressing fire to pin units and force Greg to draw chits to re-activate them, thus degrading force morale. However, Greg got lucky drawing several “air attack” and “breakdown” chits rather than “numbers”. But soon blazing Polish tankettes and an armoured car also littered the table,

only killing one PzII in reply.

Greg’s chit count mounted as he continued to un-pin units, and Tony now started to use a mixture of suppression fire and direct fire to kill units. One Polish infantry team routed when it was pinned and then failed its morale check.

Greg was sure the Poles were doomed, but gallantly pressed on. His armour and infantry managed to wipe a German dug-in infantry section, and the Vickers Es also knocked out a second Panzer II and the heroically annoying Sdkfz222 armoured car.

Artillery fire finally killed the Mg34 team who had hung-on grimly since being decimated in turn three, and a lunatic bayonet charge across open ground saw the Poles wipe out Tony’s platoon command unit and break the German morale. A close run thing as Greg was also close to breaking point.

Both Greg and Tony declared it a “good game”, and said they enjoyed it. As with most BG “Blitzkrieg” games this was a real “combined arms” encounter, and not the seeming tank-fest of the later years of WW2. The tanks don’t dominate, artillery is important but not battle-winning and the infantry have a real role to play. The game could easily have gone the other way if Greg had drawn “numbered” chits early in the game, but he didn’t! That’s one of the fun or frustrating aspects of “Battlegroup”, depending on your point of view. As ever we found a few oddities in the rules. The German 50mm mortar at one stage seemed a battle-winning weapon, and the rules and data cards had different interpretations of their use and effectiveness. I was also baffled by the potency of the Polish Vickers E’s 47mm gun. Knowing that it was a short, low-velocity gun, and to quote Osprey’s Polish Armour of the Blitzkrieg, the Poles found “the performance...disappointing”, I was amazed to find it has the same anti-armour performance as the high velocity 37mm Bofors the Poles selected for their own 7TP design. I also see that in BG Blitzkrieg the 7TP costs less than the Vickers E. Something is definitely not right here!

Saturday afternoon sees our reporter packed off to sunnier climes in Southern Italy during the 3rd Servile War for a large game of TTS.I can’t wait!

Simon