The Bridges over The Desna - A return to the 10mm Eastern Front

And we're back. 

After a hiatus of over a year while we all played with our shiny new toys, I finally created an excuse to bring our lovely 10mm minis and scenery out of storage for some more Eastern Front BKC2 gaming. 

I'd been ruminating, as wargamers do, for some time on different styles of play. Specifically I wanted to achieve an element of surprise in a game and to make the player have to balance achieving their objectives with preserving their forces. Perhaps our group’s legacy of 40K means we all too often play games where we’re happy to lose 90% of our force if it means we can clear the 2” around the objective marker on turn 6. 

Inspired in equal parts by the recent Mons scenarios in Wargames Illustrated, the 'surprise' nukes Cold War scenario in in John Curry’s “Innovations in Wargaming vol.1” and by a desire chuckle in a sinister fashion as an omnipotent gamesMASTER, I decided to try to write a series of  umpire moderated scenarios. This allowed me to explore/experiment with hidden set ups, changing orders, force preservation and general misdirection to my amusement and, I hoped, annoyance and frustration on the part of the players.

The battlefield viewed from the Soviet table edge

This scenario ‘Bridges over the Desna’ is intended as the first of 3 scenarios set in early Autumn 1943 in the aftermath of Kursk as the Wehrmacht retreated towards the Dnieper.

The German player holds a river line that lies across the axis of a major Soviet advance. He is tasked with holding 3 bridges against a major assault, giving time for his superiors to assemble a counter attack. To spice things up, his briefing tells him that the bridges are wired to be blown but that he's forbidden to blow them except in an emergency. They need to be kept open for armoured reinforcements later in the game which will conduct a counter-attack. The Germans must commit 3 companies of infantry, plus his ATGs and support weapons dug-in in forward positions with the rest of his force and vehicles held back near his baseline. He's given no indication of game length and simply advised that holding the bridges will see him win the game, with revised orders and victory conditions to be provided along with the reinforcements.

The Soviet player on the other hand is told that his mission is simple. He has 12 turns to force the crossings and get his tank forces to the German table edge. To achieve this he is provided with 50% more points than the German player and is asked to split his forces into 3 groups, two infantry groups that will begin the game by entering from his table edge, and one armoured group that will arrive on a flank on turn 4 which should be a shock for the German player. The aim is to have the German player feel a bit swamped mid game but hanging on waiting for his armoured counterstrike to arrive.

The big surprise I had up my sleeve was that the German reinforcements were never going to arrive.  Instead they would receive orders in the mid game changing their victory conditions to blowing the bridges and withdrawing in good order. Hopefully this would come at a point where they had committed their reserves to the struggle for the bridges. 

In ‘real life’ ™, commanders rarely have the luxury of a set time to achieve a clearly defined, unchanging set of victory conditions. I really wanted to see what happened when a player was presented with different victory conditions mid-way through a game. It also represented an attempt to convey the confusion of this period of the war where the Germans were essentially bounced one stop-line to the next by Soviet advances and breakthroughs.

To make my life more difficult, and to ensure that the Soviet player had to spend a fair amount of the early game in another room, I'd decided that the German set up would be hidden at the start. I had the German player deploy his entire force and fortifications on the table, then removed and plotted on a map anything that I felt would not be visible from the Soviet entry points. Any stand that moved in line of sight, fired or came within the line of sight of the Soviets as they advanced was placed on the board. In practice this meant that the German entrenchments in the open were visible but anything in cover or behind the hills was invisible to the Soviets at the start.

This worked pretty well. It encouraged the Germans to deploy in cover and to hold fire with their Anti-Tank guns until they had good targets. It also meant that the Soviets either had to creep forward and recce the area or push on with a recon in force and wait for the Germans to reveal themselves. Unsurprisingly Tom chose the latter.

It did mean that the Soviet player had to take on trust the outcome of his scheduled artillery barrages. I gave him 6 scheduled assets from two 152mm guns which he committed at a rate of two per turn for the first 3 turns. He chose the locations at the start of the game, then sat in the other room while I rolled his dice for him, never knowing if he'd come up trumps. Given that he'd not previously reconnoitred the position and the German defences were recent and hasty rather than an established defensive line, I rather liked the 'blind barrage' effect. As it turned out, the artillery was surprisingly ineffective, missing the concentrations of German troops and barely scratching the dug-in guns.

One other tweak to the usual order of things was designed to give the game the 'feel' I wanted. BKC works on command stand activations which can mean that you have whole turns where you don't get to do much as you fail to roll under your command value. I've played as Soviets quite a bit and their low CV can make for frustrating turns where nothing moves or fires. Given that I wanted to have the Soviets rush the bridges, I decided to allow the Soviets a ‘free’ advance move directly towards the bridges each turn. If they wished to do anything else instead they could roll as normal, and if they wished to issue a second order after their free move, they could do so with the usual BKC -1 penalty.

This should, and did, mean that the Soviets closed up on the bridges quickly but gave no advantage when it came to pressing the attack. I was quite pleased with this as a concept and it helped ensure that the focus of the game was on the bridges.

So, on to the OOBs. These are shamelessly based on the models we've got between us. I’ve made no attempt to organise them as historical TOEs I’m afraid. 

German Order of Battle:

  

Unit	#	Move	AT	AP	CA	Hits	Save
CO10	1	60		3/30		6	6
HQ8	2	40		2/30		4	6
Pioneers	3	10		3/30	8	6
Sdkfz 251/5	3	25		1/40	2	3	6
Infantry (Heer)	18	10		3/30	4	6
MMG	3	10		3/60	2	5
81mm Mortar	1	10	3/120	3/120	2	5
PAK40	3	5	4/80	3/80	2	4
StuGIII	3	20	2/60	3/80	3	4	5
Sdkfz 251/1	6	25		1/40	2	3	6
Trucks	9	20				3
Wespe	2	20	4/40	4/100	2	3	6
Trenches	15
Gun Pits	3
20cm wire	2

Soviet Order of Battle:

Unit	#	Move	AT	AP	CA	Hits	Save
Mortar	4	10	3/120	3/120	2	5
MGs	5	10		3/60	2	5
Infantry	30	10		3/30	4	6
SU-76	4	20	2/40	3/80	2	3	6
T-34	6	25	3/60	3/80	3	5	5
KV1-1s	2	20	3/60	3/80	4	6	4
120mm mortar	1	0	5/120	5/120	2	4
IG-76	2	10	2/40	3/80	2	4
ATG-57mm	3	5	3/60	2/60	2	4
CO8	1	60		3/30		6	6
HQ8	4	40		2/30		4	6
Trucks	15	20				3
Recce - BA64	1	20		1/40	2	3	6
Artillery - 152mm	2		4	4	2
Artillery HE assets	6

Next post - How the game played out...