I had looked at buying the Sarissa Productions train for this scenario but the expense and my lack of enthusiasm for making an MDF train put me off this idea. I did have an old Hornby train set that I thought would be too small for 28 mm figures but, on examination, it didn't look too bad. With a quick repaint in grey and an extra few cheap wagons from eBay it looked very presentable:
In this scenario the Partizans have blocked the rail line and are expecting to attack a lightly defended German supply train. The Germans have anticipated the attack however and loaded a full platoon of Panzer Grenadiers on the train to defend it.
The terrain was fairly open with woods along the table edge and some areas of light cover along the railway line:
The Germans have three jump off points on the train while I placed the four Soviet jump offs two each on either side of the train.
My plan was to build up the attack slowly, setting up covering fire and trying to pin the Germans down. An initial double phase resulted in me throwing the plan out of the window and attempting to rush the train with a single Partizan section. Unfortunately they didn't make much progress and fell well short:
The Germans immediately responded by deploying a MMG and a Section of infantry both of which opened up on the Partizans. Considering the amount of fire the Germans put down the Partizans survived with relatively little damage:
The Partizans have inflicted some damage on the Germans aided by the deployment of the Soviet MMG on the opposite side of the train. However, due to losses, the Partizans have had to put down suppressing fire to slow the rate of casualties and deploy their only senior leader which will make it hard to deploy further Partizan units:
In response another German section deploys to take on the Partizan MMG. I'd thought that the MMG had a Junior Leader with it but was mistaken in that so when Gary put a load of shock on it there was no way for me to rally the shock off having already deployed my senior leader:
The initial Partizan squad finally broke and ran for the woods. They had held on bravely and done a lot of damage to the Germans opposing them but I had been unable to support them properly due to the early deployment of the senior leader:
The third German section has deployed and the Partizan MMG has been eliminated. Soviet force morale is falling quickly:
The second Partizan section finally manages to deploy together with a 5 cm mortar. The initial German section is quickly finished off. Is the tide starting to turn?
The German MMG and the second Partizan squad exchange fire:
With the third German section joining in the firefight the second Partizan section has to lay down covering fire to reduce their losses. In the background the second German section has captured one Soviet jump off point and is heading quickly towards the third:
Just in time the final Partizan section is able to deploy to defend the jump off point:
The Germans launch an 'handgrenaten' attack on the Soviet defenders:
The attackers are wiped out but the Partizans take heavy losses:
The third German section heads towards another Soviet jump off point. The Partizans have nothing left to defend it and their morale is almost broken:
The Partizans in the wood are winning the firefight against the German MMG but have few men left:
The Germans have captured another jump off point breaking the Partizans morale. The train has survived the attack!:
Gary and I both thought before the game that it was a tough ask for the Soviets to take the train. The Germans have two very effective LMG's per squad and also have two senior leaders enabling them to act on a number of command dice and rally off shock quickly.
I think I should have stuck to my original plan, having to deploy my single senior leader early made it difficult to bring on more forces and I wasted the MMG by deploying it with no leader nearby so I learned something from this game.
Despite that I think the Partizans put up a good fight, two German sections were pretty much wiped out and towards the end the Partizan position was perhaps slightly stronger but the loss of command dice resulting from their dropping force morale meant they couldn't really do anything.
The next scenario in the campaign sees the train pull into Koteinikovo while the Soviet 4th Cavalry army makes an attack on the town, hopefully we will get to play this soon as we both enjoyed this game.
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