1945 Soviet Breakthrough Attack

Yesterday Richard and I had a game of Blitzkrieg Commander using a few models from his magnificent collection.  Late war Breakthrough Attack.  I was lucky to go Soviet.

The German right flank included this village.  Everything is Richard's except the minefield markers and some of the entrenchments. 

The German left flank was more open.  The whole position was well protected by minefields with the troops well dug in.

A very strong force of assault engineers head for the village.

Turn 2 or 3 after the Katyushas had blasted village and smoke was laid to cover the engineers (who had thankfully reached the wire in time).  Yes, the photo has been edited - we didn't have enough cotton wool to fully show the smokescreen.  The engineers had taken a few casualties getting this far and I was lucky that I had been able to get them to dismount before they really got shot up.

A force of IS-2s had arrived on the Soviet left flank on Turn 1, but didn't actually go much further than this.  Their long range allowed them to take on the German Stugs with ease.  Again a smoke images added post taking of photo, I've also patched the lower left hand corner as that was the edge of the table and it spoiled the look to leave a corner of table cloth on show.

A unit of T34/85s with tank riders moves up to exploit the gap cleared by the engineers, but by this time, Turn 4 (out of a possible 12), it was all over.

All the destruction done by the Katyushas, with a little help from the the IS-2s and some incidental work by a few other troops, had broken the German morale.

Observation

We were careful to play strictly to the set-up, but the wide front allows the attacker to focus on a very narrow front and combined with the scheduled bombardments results in a pretty overwhelming situation.

I need to do some analysis of what it would be like to attack down the length of the table.

Some other analysis might be warranted on the placement of defensive troops so they are each outside a radius of a rocket strike of each other.

Regardless, we had four hours of play, including set-up, with a set of well integrated rules, even if a tad abstract.