Cretan Holiday

I recently received a fan-mail from mrs_trellis@northwales.com asking me when my coverage of the Four Foot Snake Thing will be uploaded here. This post is something of a reply.

I've been  getting very CoC-ky with my posts lately.

Nope! I bring you news of my recent wargaming weekend, featuring the first outing for Suzanne's Fallschirmjaegers and my new yellow felt mat. With my usual half-hearted attempts at historical (hysterical?) accuracy, I wondered if there were any campaigns featuring both Fallschirmjaeger and Khaki Drill-clad Brits and, fortunately, the German invasion of Crete fits the bill perfectly.
My forces represent the 14th infantry brigade (for the patrol markers I used the marking of the 6th infantry division of whom they were a part) defending Heraklion airfield on the 21st of May, with Suzanne commanding the 7th Flieger division contingent. The terrain was set up in imitation of Cretan countryside, although my limited collection left the field a little bare.

Terrain for game 1, showcasing the new Mediterranean houses and  the dirt roads/wadis I've fashioned

The first scenario rolled was "Attack on an Objective", a hill in my deployment zone which it must be assumed offered a commanding view of the airfield. For the first game, the Germans were attackers by default. The patrol phase obliged me, as the defender, to use 4 patrol markers (I prefer to use 3 to move more quickly). Suzanne chose 4 also, hoping the flexibility in deployment would make up for the more sluggish patrolling. I think I did rather a good job in the patrol phase, denying her the walled orchard, although I was left with a lot of empty space with nowhere to really deploy but behind hills. (ie nowhere that was in cover)

End of the patrol phase: I've managed to keep Suzanne hemmed into a corner but she has a jump-off point on the table edge within easy striking distance of me. The stars on my patrol markers should be red, but the printer was on the blink so they came out sort of blue.

After we had deployed our jump-off points, I realised I had made the grievous error of placing one in the middle of nowhere with a clear route for the Fallschirmjaeger to sweep upon it like a wolf upon the fold. I was thus obliged to buy some wire to at least force them to go around. It was a good thing I'd made a couple of lengths in preparation! Lesson from this is, as the defender, deploy quite far back so the attacker has further to travel before you have to deploy troops.

Suzanne lays her cards on the table, deploying from all three jump-off points (circled). My fourth JOP is out of shot, where the road meets the table edge.

Crete was the high water mark for German airborne operations, so I thought the fallschirmjaeger should be rated as elite troops, with a a variety of benefits including improving their longevity in long-range firefights. Combined with the excellent German light machine gun, the open terrain would be against me. I would have liked to counter this with some HE, but until American equipment arrives (M3 Grants, M4 Shermans, even M3 Stuarts), the Brits don't get any whatsoever! The best I could come up with was a Vickers MkVI with twin machine guns. Better than nothing, but...

The mighty Vickers Mk VI faces her baptism of fire.

Thankfully, despite a severe disadvantage in firefight (as regular troops, the Brits were hit on 5 or 6 at effective range vs 6 only for the Germans) Suzanne once again waxed overly sanguine and hurled her machine-pistol toting squad at my troops in front of my vulnerable JOP. Despite the advantage of elite troops, charging an unpinned section with LMG at the ready invariably leads to enormous casualties which sent Suzzanne's force morale down to zero and British victory.

A lesson which bears repeating: DO NOT frontally assault unsupressed troops in Chain of Command unless you want to suffer horrendous casualties.

The second game was therefore a British counter-attack. We rolled a probe scenario, which is like British Bulldog in that the attackers have to get one unit past the opposition and off the edge of the table. I set off with my preferred three patrol markers and rushed straight for the buildings (hard cover). I was successful in getting a jump-off point in one, but this left me rather hemmed in with Suzanne able to surround any deployment I might make.

Patrol markers and jump-off points for game 2. Yet again, one of my JOPs is out of shot on the right-hand table edge.

I started off with my tripod machine gun in one of the houses and a section in the walled field. Suzanne replied by deploying all three of her squads, including one in entrenchments. Usually, this is frowned upon in Chain of Command circles, as it tends to show your hand early and allow the enemy to work around you, but given my restricted JOP placement, poorer troops and lesser firepower, I think it might have been the right decision. The machine gun team started to take a lot of fire and I decided to bring in the platoon sergeant to help manage the shock and keep them in the game.

All of Suzanne's forces are deployed (the third squad is at the wall at the  bottom edge of the photo) and not even my tripod machine gun is tipping the firefight toward me.

Suzanne, again being what I consider to be over-aggressive, charged a squad into the building to winkle them out. Again, charging an unpinned machine gun to the front in hard cover resulted in huge casualties, but the small, fragile squad were wiped out alongside my platoon sergeant, which lost me the jump-off point and a lot of force morale.

The British high water mark: the machine gun team and platoon sergeant are wiped out, but manage to rout the squad which assaulted them. I've brought in a fresh platoon to re-take the JOP in the house.

I decided the best course of action would be to quickly sneak a section into the building to recapture the building and prevent further morale loss. This turned out to be a mistake. My section began taking fire from not only Suzanne's entrenched squad but also a motley crew of SMG-toting junior leaders holed up in the other building. I would have done better to accept the loss and try to manoeuvre around Suzanne's defence instead. The result was that the section took a lot of fire in the open at close range and were whittled down to the brink of routing. Throwing good money after bad I sent in another section to absorb some of the fire but it just got them pinned as well. With no more troops left and force morale circling the drain I decided to throw in the towel.

Smug, self-aggrandising shot of the fleeing paratroops. The card shapes indicate entrenchments, I was going to put sand around the rims and paint them brown but didn't get round to it.

So, what went wrong? I think my first mistake was taking pity on Suzanne and spending 4 support points on an engineer section which I didn't really need. Not only was this rather patronising of me, but it meant I didn't have any real means to break up the German defence. A mortar battery and observer would have given me an easy way to essentially trap one or two German squads under the barrage and concentrate on the third with overwhelming fire to pick it off in isolation while another tripod machine gun or an extra section might have tipped the balance in a firefight. My second mistake was not remembering the scenario rules: I don't need to out-fight the Germans, I just need to evade them. I would have been better served by keeping my troops out of harms way and sending my machine-gun proof tank to romp over the open fields to victory. Finally, I fell into the classic Chain of Command trap of deploying alone in a building. Hard cover is all well and good but it can leave troops isolated under fire with no avenue of escape. Ah well. Hindsight, as they say, is 20:20. Also, attacking in Chain of Command is a challenge all to itself!

Both the JOP-capturing section and the section I brought on to rescue them are pinned under SMG fire and I throw in the towel. The Germans can regroup for another go at the airfield...

Next update will probably be a nice and simple hobby update, much less work than these battle reports! Unsurprisingly I've got a fair bit done in the months since last update, so there are plenty of pics to upload. Stay tuned.