Spreading the Fausts Around

[landser]

Good post, I know what you mean about medieval cavalry, and I've done the same, but not in this campaign. I didn't take too many risks really in this one.

I sent the main effort on the right to clear the town starting with W. A full company of infantry, plus most of my armor. The other company worked themselves through the woods to the left, finding nothing, then I worked them through a ditch to reach a copse of wood, which in turn lead to the ditch the AT guns were in. The cannister greeting convinced me it was a bad job and I left them alone and never got my armor anywhere near the crossroads objective, and the second company was now sorta stuck and didn't do much afterwards. After clearing W, I then moved in to Stary Jankow but ran out of time and scored a minor.

[Bozowans]

Well it took me forever but I finally did it! Finished the whole campaign. That was a pretty epic finale there. I was pretty aggressive and forced a surrender with 37 minutes left to go on the clock.

Here's the final tally for the whole campaign:

 

That's 319 casualties for me plus 19 tanks. Most of those other vehicles were destroyed by aircraft.

Soviets took 1,549 casualties plus 90 tanks, 12 assault guns and a ridiculous number of trucks and jeeps. I shot down a Soviet plane in the final battle, making it 2 planes shot down overall, which was a nice surprise. The Soviet planes did absolutely nothing in the final battle except strafe an empty truck and then immediately get shot down. 

In the final battle I took 125 casualties and 9 tanks lost. Several of those tanks were lost due to a couple of horribly botched flanking maneuvers on my part. Most of the enemy tanks were in a big line across the map. Their tank line was very strong, but I managed to break through on the far left and right flanks, so I tried to slip a couple tank platoons deep around into the enemy rear areas to encircle them, flank the rest of their tanks and roll up the enemy line. Turns out the map designer placed some assault guns hidden deep in the rear in a second line right up against the map edge to prevent just such a thing. Whoops! 

The enemy took 467 casualties in the final battle, 23 of them POWs. Plus 18 tanks lost and 7 assault guns. The artillery you get is pretty devastating. One of my observers alone caused 88 casualties, and I didn't even use all that much artillery. I was playing on the highest difficulty so the call times were pretty long. I had the enemy surrounded toward the end, and I was getting ready to dump all the rest of my artillery onto the final enemy positions in the center of their line. I had 150mm shells falling into the middle of a bunch of their positions and I was attacking from every direction when they finally surrendered.

Based on this campaign, if I were to criticize my own playstyle, I would have a few points:

a) I should be more cautious. I tend to start each scenario very cautiously, sneaking everyone around and doing careful recon and doing very well overall in the initial phases, but once the battle is halfway through or so, I start getting more and more impatient and I get aggressive and start throwing everyone into the meat grinder. It's especially hard to be cautious in a campaign like this, where the scenarios are so massive.

b) I should use more smoke. I always forget that I even have smoke, and I'm not very good at using it even when I remember that I have it.

c) I should be more liberal with my ammo and artillery usage. Even though you have to conserve ammo in this campaign, it was never a problem for me at all and I always had a ton left over. Your infantry gets thousands of rounds of extra ammo in their trucks and half-tracks and they can always go back for more. I always have a lot of artillery left over as well. There was a huge amount left over in the final battle. It just takes so long to first find the enemy, then get observers into good positions and then it takes even longer to wait for them to call it in. I get impatient and then I just attack anyway. The artillery is often very effective though when I do end up using it. One of the highlights of the final battle for me was when a T-34 got hit by 120mm mortars twice in almost the exact same spot. The two shell holes were only inches apart from each other. I had only intended to force the T-34 commander to button up, not expecting any of the mortars to actually hit, but I ended up blowing up the tank twice over.

[landser]

Well done and congrats on finishing that one. It's a beast of a campaign. One of the best I've played though.

Yes, smoke is vital, and I use it liberally. Artillery ammunition is fully replenished after each mission in this campaign if I recall, so no compelling reason to conserve it for later use.

Are you saying the 120mm mortar got a penetration kill on a T-34? I didn't know that was possible.

[Bozowans]

I took a screenshot of the tank:

 

Those two penetrations on the side were both 120mm mortars falling onto it. You can see another mortar from the same battery exploding in the background in the picture. They are not very accurate so I was amazed when I got even one hit. Then the second one happened a minute later.

I've seen mortars knock out vehicles before, and even saw a mortar fall through the open hatch of a tank turret once, but I've never seen two hit so close together before in years of playing these games. So that was interesting. 

[John Kettler]

Bozowans,

Believe it was at Anzio (check The Ordnance Corps: From Beachead to Battlefront under 4.2 chemical mortar on Hyperwar), but a US 4.2 inch mortar dropped one right though the open commander's hatch on a Mark IV, killing it outright but somehow, I believe, not blowing up the tank. Memory's a bit hazy, but the dropping it through the open hatch part is rock solid. Also, over on CMBS, Haiduk produced pics of a T-64BV that sustained a direct 120 mm mortar hit on the turret roof near a hatch. Detonation blew the gunner's hatch clean off and stripped almost everything off the turret roof, I believe, together with its welded on mounting collar. The below pic says this was 122 mm, which almost certainly makes it FA, not mortar, but am pretty sure what I originally read said 120 mm mortar. Either way, and admittedly with better explosives by some margin over straight TNT fill for US WW II, this is the kind of damage it inflicted. In the Reddit thread where I found that pic, one of the comments is that the commenter says an 81 mm mortar did that, to which I reply bunk! As it happens, I know of an incident from WW II in which a tank (the weakly armored British Mark VI light tank) took a direct roof hit during the Battle of Crete from a German 8 cm mortar bomb. It blew the hatch open and wounded the TC on the hand. 
 

Regards,

John Kettler

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Edited February 5, 2020 by John Kettler