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Friday, 1 August 2014

Canadians in Caen

Last night we played Battlegroup: Overlord, with a scenario set during the Caen breakout involving a force of Canadians travelling along a road being hit in the flank by a somewhat overwhelming German counterattack.

Here are the Canadians, with carrier-borne infantry to the fore, and a pile of Shermans behind them. The German objective was the village the Canadians are passing through.


Some of the Germans. I seem to have not taken any more pictures of them, but they had Pz IVs, aome Panthers and these self-propelled guns, amongst other things. Oh, and infantry, whose real use was to occupy the village.


The tail-end of the on-table Canadians. There were more Shermans, and some Achilles tank-destroyers, off-table.


The air-support was singularly ineffective. They turned up but once, and failed to hit anything.


Mostly unrecorded by camera, our Shermans were soon burning, unable to make much impression in reply to teh German fire. We had Fireflies, of course, but they spent a lot of the time suppressed and unable to fire. One of them finally managed to knock out a Pz IV however. One of our finest moments of the game ...


Ah, here we are. Wall-to-wall German armour.


German infantry set up some machine-guns and took the target village under fire.


German Commander Caesar to his forces: "Take out that Sherman; it's our greatest threat!"

Canadian Commander: "WTF?"


Canadian reinforcements push onto the table past the smoking remains of other 'greatest threats'.


The germans win was inevitable, and was caused by Canadian morale breaking just as the RAF decided that they might put on another display of formation target-missing.

Geoff and Peter put on another game of DBM, which included a Byzantine flame-thrower. I managed to not get any pictures of it.

Meanwhile on another table we were treated to gorgeous jungle-terrain and a game of the 1970s TSR ruleset Tractics. The apparently complex computations were managed on a laptop, however.


The game involved Australians and Japanese, but I can't tell you much more about it that that.



2 comments:

  1. Yes, a battle full of terrifying Shermans and lots of fun. My favourite vehicles of the night, the Hummels, proved quite handy at pinning the pointier elements of Allied armour, so we could concentrate our panzers on the "very threatening" bog-standard Shermans.

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  2. Lol! Actually it was great playing alongside Alan, his reputation as a 'Fearless' cavalry commander preceded him, and so it was fitting that he was in command of our 'cavalry; the tanks of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers....and he did take out a Panther - not easily done - if we just take that away from the game it wasn't so bad....

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