Getting a bit Gung Ho in Normandy

This week we were in Richard's spare bedroom, which had been transported to Northern France after D Day. The US Army had broken through, and was rushing across the countryside to try and find some Nazis to kill.

Phil, Chris K and I were on site as platoon commanders, with Jon online as Company CO. Will was also online as the fiendish Nazis. 

We had a column of trucks and jeeps, headed by a small tank. My platoon was at the back. The game started with a loud bang, as the tank was knocked out emerging from a sunken lane.

As mortar shells fell around us, Chris debussed pronto and headed for the source of the anti tank firing. The large dice are the various elements' strength points.

Sure enough some sneaky ATK gun was hiding in the trees.

Without pausing to open fire, Chris close assaulted the gun team, who lost a man or two before fleeing. His platoon jeep has been disabled by a shot from a sniper. I must observe at this point that this was the first time I had played the rules, and most hadn't played them much before either, I think. That meant I wasn't sure how the platoon drill sequence was supposed to work. For example, how did fire and movement work?

Phil had hopped out of his trucks, and was heading out on our right, towards the top of the picture. We've lost a truck to mortar fire, I think. Might have been a sniper. It was all a bit confused. My platoon had needed to back up in the lane and find a field gate so we could by pass the log jam. In one of my early SCW games with Richard he had driven the length of the table at high speed, then debussed adjacent to the enemy. I was mulling over doing something similar, to see if it was how he personally thinks things should work.

Phil's guys are getting most of the mortar fire. He's lost some men already.

The only aerial shot I took of the game. Chris is fighting through the woods at the bottom of the picture, whilst working out if he can get the German ATK gun into operation to fire at the Nazis in the café (you can see them on the roof). Rene has left the building.

I have got round the traffic jam with my trucks, and am heading for the far edge of the board. Our objective is to exit, with men in trucks. Behind the hedge, Jon has brought up some company assets, namely MMGs. He has deployed our mortars at the table edge to provide fire support. Our mortars have taken a sighting shot at the pinkish tall building near the café, which Phil is lining up to attack. Again we got the sequence wrong here. It turned out that Phil just couldn't wait for the mortars to fire effectively, so we wasted our main support weapons, which we probably should have used on something else. Like the café or the tree line where the sniper probably was.

I only say that because as I pulled up the road the sniper hit my platoon command jeep, causing it to crash. 

Phil stormed through the dust cloud caused by the mortar shells, and captured an empty building.

I lost another vehicle. Can't remember what to. It might have been the men in the café, or some Germans at the edge of the wood you'll see in the next picture.  However, by now we had switched the mortars to the tree line off to the left that is not in any of the pictures. The sniper stopped firing. Anyhow, I debussed everything as it seemed safest for now, and shot up the café for a bit.

Phil stormed and captured the café and the other building. I pushed up the road, and lost a truck to a vehicle mine ("You did drive past a road closed sign" Richard helpfully remarked). The rest of Will's platoon were hiding in the trees behind where the smoke is. We drove them off, and the game ended.

It was a tense game, and worked well with the Nazis not deployed on the table. The rules I'll have to get used to. We had a QRS, but mine had the same info on both sides (duplexing error) so I'm not sure as I said above, how to get the tactics right in an IGO-UGO. In FWTDR, for example (which isn't skirmish, I know) having the three activations means you can plan a close assault with suppressive fire and movement. I'm sure it can be done here, Just don't know exactly how. We also had some odd combat outcomes, but it was a fairly small sample of events, so no conclusions can be drawn.

I'm sure we'll be back.