New Scenario - "A Tough Nut"

[ClaytoniousRex]

Dark_au has created another interesting scenario called "A Tough Nut". It's an objective scenario with the objective placed on a hill with several sheer faces - a "tough nut" for the attacker to crack.

You can download it here.

[ July 18, 2006, 10:04 PM: Message edited by: ClaytoniousRex ]

[Dark_au]

Gday,

Maybe someone can help me with this one. I really would like to limit the vehicles available to the defender. The base is supposed to be an artillery firebase so I really wanted to have the defender mainly have a few apollos and a lot of 76mm paladins for point defence. The rest should be artillery units. Oh and maybe less AA guns than normal.

The scenario has many historical analogies. Khe Sahn, Massada, Monte Cassino. The tactical situation favours the defender. I don't think this one is too hard but its difficult to tell playing against bots.

[ClaytoniousRex]

I think it would be cool for the defender to be limited almost entirely to infantry with precious few support vehicles.

At any rate, would you like an example of how to set the defender's and attacker's inventories in the scenario?

[Dark_au]

Please

[aittam]

very nice, i'll throw in a couple of terrace with little protection where defencerd coul hull down

Dark_au it's a couple of days that i'm wondering about a scenario based on the Golan tank battle during yom kippur (1973), would you like to do the map?

[Jalinth]

First - Very interesting scenario. I've downloaded it and will be trying it out in a little while.

Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex :

At any rate, would you like an example of how to set the defender's and attacker's inventories in the scenario?

Yes, that would be wonderful. I've got some interesting ideas that would be very messy with the standard loadout of armour.

[ July 20, 2006, 08:34 AM: Message edited by: Jalinth ]

[aittam]

Originally posted by aittam:

very nice, i'll throw in a couple of terrace with little protection where defencerd coul hull down

Dark_au it's a couple of days that i'm wondering about a scenario based on the Golan tank battle during yom kippur (1973), would you like to do the map?

On the Golan Heights

In the Golan Heights, the Syrians attacked the Israeli defenses of two brigades and eleven artillery batteries with five divisions and 188 batteries. At the onset of the battle, 188 Israeli tanks faced off against approximately 2,000 Syrian tanks. Every Israeli tank deployed on the Golan Heights was engaged during the initial attacks. Syrian commandos dropped by helicopter also took the most important Israeli stronghold at Jabal al Shaikh (Mount Hermon), which had a variety of surveillance equipment.

Golan heights campaign

Fighting in the Golan Heights was given priority by the Israeli High Command. The fighting in the Sinai was sufficiently far away that Israel was not immediately threatened; should the Golan Heights fall, the Syrians could easily advance into Israel proper. Reservists were directed to the Golan as quickly as possible. They were assigned to tanks and sent to the front as soon as they arrived at army depots, without waiting for the crews they trained with to arrive, without waiting for machine guns to be installed on their tanks, and without taking the time to calibrate their tank guns (a time-consuming process known as bore-sighting).

As the Egyptians had in the Sinai, the Syrians on the Golan Heights took care to stay under cover of their SAM missile batteries. Also as in the Sinai, the Syrians made use of Soviet anti-tank weapons (which, because of the uneven terrain, were not as effective as in the flat Sinai desert).

The Syrians had expected it would take at least 24 hours for Israeli reserves to reach the front lines; in fact, Israeli reserve units began reaching the battle lines only fifteen hours after the war began.

By the end of the first day of battle, the Syrians (who at the start outnumbered the Israelis in the Golan 9 to 1) had achieved moderate success. Towards the end of the day, "A Syrian tank brigade passing through the Rafid Gap turned northwest up a little-used route known as the Tapline Road, which cut diagonally across the Golan. This roadway would prove one of the main strategic hinges of the battle. It led straight from the main Syrian breakthrough points to Nafah, which was not only the location of Israeli divisional headquarters but the most important crossroads on the Heights."[7] During the night, Lieutenant Zvika Greengold, who had just arrived to the battle unattached to any unit, fought them off with his single tank until help arrived. "For the next 20 hours, Zvika Force, as he came to be known on the radio net, fought running battles with Syrian tanks—sometimes alone, sometimes as part of a larger unit, changing tanks half a dozen times as they were knocked out. He was wounded and burned but stayed in action and repeatedly showed up at critical moments from an unexpected direction to change the course of a skirmish."[7] . For his actions, Zvika became a national hero in Israel.

"Syrian tanks at Israeli anti-tank ditch in the Golan. A tank, hit by Israeli fire, has fallen off one of the two bridges the Syrians laid across the ditch. Another knocked out tank lies in the ditch. To the left is the roadway the Syrians later succeeded in opening through the barrier" (Rabinovich, 178).

During over four days of fighting, the Israeli 7th Armored Brigade in the north (commanded by Yanush Ben Gal) managed to hold the rocky hill line defending the northern flank of their headquarters in Nafah. For some as-yet-unexplained reason, the Syrians were close to conquering Nafah, yet they stopped the advance on Nafah's fences, letting Israel assemble a defensive line. The most reasonable explanation for this is that the Syrians had calculated estimated advances, and the commanders in the field didn't want to digress from the plan. To the south, however, the Barak Armored Brigade, bereft of any natural defenses, began to take on heavy casualties. Brigade Commander Colonel Shoham was killed during the second day of fighting, along with his Second in Command and their Operations Officer (each in a separate tank) as the Syrians desperately tried to push inwards towards the Sea of Galilee and towards Nafah. At this point the Brigade stopped functioning as a cohesive force, although the remaining tanks and crewmen continued fighting independently.

The tide in the Golan turned as the arriving Israeli reserve forces were able to contain and, starting 8 October, push back the Syrian offensive. The tiny Golan Heights were too small to act as an effective territorial buffer, unlike the Sinai Peninsula in the south, but it proved to be a strategic geographical stronghold and was a crucial key in preventing the Syrian army from bombing the cities below. By Wednesday, October 10, the last Syrian unit in the Central sector had been pushed back across the purple line, that is, the pre-war border (Rabinovich, 302).

A decision now had to be made—whether to ease the fighting down and end the war at the 1967 border, or to continue the war into Syrian territory. Israeli High Command spent the entire October 10 debating this, well into the night. Some favored disengagement, which would allow soldiers to be redeployed to the Sinai (Shmuel Gonen's ignominious defeat at Hizayon in the Sinai had happened two days earlier). Others favored continuing the attack into Syria, towards Damascus, which would knock Syria out of the war; it would also restore Israel's image as the supreme military power in the Middle East and would give them a valuable bargaining chip once the war ended. Others countered that Syria had strong defenses—antitank ditches, minefields, and strongpoints—and that it would be better to fight from defensive positions in the Golan Heights (rather than the flat terrain of Syria) in the event of another war with Syria. However, Prime Minister Meir realized the most crucial point of the whole debate—"It would take four days to shift a division to the Sinai. If the war ended during this period, the war would end with a territorial loss for Israel in the Sinai and no gain in the north—an unmitigated defeat. This was a political matter and her decision was unmitigating—to cross the purple line… The attack would be launched tomorrow, Thursday, October 11" (Rabinovich, 304).

From 11 October to 14 October, the Israeli forces pushed into Syria, conquering a further twenty-square-mile box of territory in the Bashan. From there they were able to shell the outskirts of Damascus, only 40 km away, using heavy artillery.

"As Arab position on the battlefields deteriorated, pressure mounted on King Hussein to send his Army into action. He found a way to meet these demands without opening his kingdom to Israeli air attack. Instead of attacking Israel from their common border, he sent an expeditionary force into Syria. He let Israel know of his intentions, through US intermediaries, in the hope that it [israel] would accept that this was not a casus belli justifying an attack into Jordan… Dayan declined to offer any such assurance, but Israel had no intention of opening another front" (Rabinovich, 433).

Iraq also sent an expeditionary force to the Golan, consisting of some 30,000 men, 500 tanks, and 700 APCs (Rabinovich, 314). The Iraqi divisions were actually a strategic surprise for the IDF, which expected a 24-hour-plus advance intelligence of such moves. This turned into an operational surprise, as the Iraqis attacked the exposed southern flank of the advancing Israeli armor, forcing its advance units to retreat a few kilometers, in order to prevent encirclement.

Combined Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian counterattacks prevented any further Israeli gains. However, they were also unable to push the Israelis back from their Bashan salient.

On 22 October, the Golani Brigade and Sayeret Matkal commandos recaptured the outpost on Mount Hermon, after sustaining very heavy casualties from entrenched Syrian snipers strategically positioned on the mountain. An attack two weeks before had cost 25 dead and 67 wounded, while this second attack cost an additional 55 dead and 79 wounded (Rabinovich, 450). An Israeli D9 bulldozer with Israeli infantry breached a way to the peak, preventing the peak from falling into Syrian hands after the war. A paratrooper brigade took the corresponding Syrian outposts on the mountain.

[Dark_au]

Funny enough I made the Golan Heights Map for Steel Beasts Pro PE.

[aittam]

Well then you are the man!

[Dark_au]

Gday,

Done an update to the .scenario file to change the teams inventories. Get it here:- Updated scenario file.