AAR - Operation Barbarossa

After many months of not being able to game, Stuart and I managed to get in a big game of Iron Cross a couple of weeks ago; I have only just got around to writing it up because I've been spending lots of time out of the house making the most of not being in lockdown. All the miniatures and vehicles that I have been painting during lockdown got a good run-out onto the table. Here's a mostly pictorial after action report from the game we played, which was loosely set during the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in June 1941.

I had about 780 points of a German panzer division versus Stuart's Russians. He was defending a village, so started the game with all units dug in and hidden with approximately 350 points. We were trying out a new rule for units in ambush positions too, which seemed to work well, other than my tanks being on the receiving end - see the photos below for the full visual impact!  

Stuart has moved to new premises and has the space to set up some permanent (large!) gaming tables. The table we were playing on was 18 feet in length by 6 feet wide; the fully motorised Germans had to attack from one table edge and advance rapidly up the length of the table with the objective of securing three key buildings, which was the victory condition we agreed beforehand. The vehicles are mostly from Rubicon, with a few Warlord models, the buildings and trees are all from 4Ground and the miniatures are mostly from Great Escape Games.

My German force was constituted of the following armoured units:

• 3 x Panzer (35)t
• 6 x Panzer III including a sub-commander
• 2 x Panzer IV
• 2 x Panther

And some lorry transported infantry and support units:

• 1 x HQ
• 1 x heavy machine gun
• 1 x mortar
• 5 x infantry platoons

I'm not entirely sure what Stuart had on the table because (spoiler alert) he destroyed my force before I could expose much of it. He definitely had some T34s, a couple of AT guns and a couple of units of infantry. In hindsight, I would have benefited from some lighter recce units to scout ahead and locate his units, especially the dug-in/hidden tanks and anti-tank guns.  These hidden units, combined with the new ambush rule, made mincemeat of my tanks at long range. It was still lots of fun though!

This first photo shows the German panzers blindly advancing.

This shot is taken from the German deployment zone down the length of the table towards the Russian held village in the distance.

At the bottom of this photo, you can see the Panthers advancing along the road protecting the lorry-borne units. So far, there has been no sign of the Russians.

As the Germans reach the outskirts of the farm, the infantry round the corner and come face-to-face with a well-camouflaged T34...

...which immediately puts a round straight into the lorry causing heavy casualties.

At the same time, the Russian infantry open up from the cover of a wall.

Now that the action has started, more Russian units a bit further to the rear start to move up in support of their comrades on the front line.

One of the German infantry platoons rallies, along with some fire support from the Panther, and causes the Russians to fall back. The other German unit, heavily wounded, falls back into the safety of the woods (at the top of the picture).

Following the early action around the farmhouse, the main panzer force creeps inexorably toward the waiting enemy. A well dug-in T34 fires off a shot at the rearmost Panther on the road, but misses. The Panzer Ace in the Panther returns fire and punishes the Russians for their poor gunnery.

The number of casualties per side is slightly in the Russians favour at this point, but the menacing clanking of tracks, the look on the Commissars face is definitely one of worry!

The T34 in the open field behind the farmhouse is also destroyed by the Panther's big gun, though the (red) tide is about to turn.

Seeing the oily smoke in the distance, the German medium and light tanks push forwards quickly sensing a quick victory.

Great Escape Games makes some great casualty figures, which look great when strewn around destroyed tanks.

The German panzers push forward in haste, but now lose the cover that they had, which was obscuring the Russian's line of sight. The Panzer III at the junction is about to come to sticky end at the hands of Russian infantry with Molotov cocktails.

The second lorry full of infantry rushes forward and disembarks straight into vicious combat with the group of Soviets who had just assaulted the Panzer III.

The main Panzer force on the left flank is now bogged down in fighting against a couple of T34s, so the Panthers attempt to turn the Russian flank and push forward into the open field behind the farm buildings...straight into the sights of an anti-tank gun in ambush position.

Meanwhile on the German left flank, a pair of T34s in good positions make very short work of several Panzer IIIs and 35t's. Pretty soon the assault grinds to a halt amid dense clouds of black, oily smoke.

In a last ditch attempt to encircle the Soviet line, the Panther (at the top of the photo) drives over the top of the AT gun and fires into the rear of the T34. Unfortunately, it is too little, too late: the Germans have reached their break point and fall back.

I think that we played about 7 or 8 turns, but for most of that time the Germans were being ground down in a war of attrition with some well-placed Russian units, rather than continuing to advance. The new ambush rule that we played gave the outnumbered defender a new tactic, which made the placement of units, with overlapping fields of fire really effective in defending.

The ambush rule, for any other Iron Cross players who want to try it out, is:

• A unit which starts the game in a hidden position may declare, as long as it has not moved at all, that it is going to fire from an ambush position. None of the opposing player's units may interrupt an ambush. As soon as the ambushing unit has fired then it is revealed. An ambushing unit, which does not have the initiative, may attempt to interrupt the active player, but is revealed whether the interrupt attempt succeeds or fails.

After reading a lot of books about the Eastern Front during lockdown, it made me realise that the Russians were very successful in camouflaging their positions and setting ambushes against the advancing Axis forces. Even in the featureless steppe, which is ostensibly open and giving no obvious cover i.e. an open field, they were able to successfully dig in and launch an ambush. This translates to the gaming table too using the rule described above; even if a hidden token is placed in the middle of open terrain, then it can start the game as being hidden and use this rule.

Lesson for countering this: take some fast-moving recce units. Next game I will dig out my motorcycle infantry and a couple of SdKfz 222's to screen ahead of the main force.

M3 Stuart Recce Tank

As the latest lockdown has dragged on for months, I have been finding it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for anything, including gaming.  When I say "gaming", I mean the hobby in general, because over the last 12 months of the pandemic, I think that I have managed to squeeze in 3, possibly 4, actual games; the rest of my hobby time has been spent painting, terrain-making, reading, blogging etc.

Anyway, over the last several weeks I have managed to finish off an M3 Stuart tank, which I intend to use in a reconnaissance role in NW Europe-based scenarios in Iron Cross. What inspired me to dig this old Blitzkrieg Miniatures resin model out of the unpainted pile, where it has languished for years, was a book I have recently finished.  "Tank Commander: From the Fall of France to the Defeat of Germany: The Memoirs of Bill Close" was an excellent book, which I can thoroughly recommend. It follows a tank commander, Bill Close, from the start of the war all the way through to the end of hostilities 6 years later. It is quite an incredible story, not least because he was involved in so many theatres of war and managed to survive them all. Anyway, in the book he regularly refers to the recce troop, which used Stuarts to scout out enemy positions. So, at a time where little is inspiring me, I felt compelled to paint this model so that I could push it out in front of the main troop of Shermans.

A couple of things that I have been trying out this year are using an airbrush and using oil paints to weather and "distress" the paintwork. I don't know whether my photography does it justice, but the paint job has turned out pretty well, even if I do say so myself! lol

The base colour was Vallejo Model Air 71.330 Khaki Green No.3. I then highlighted some of the panels and upper-facing surfaces with a 70:30 mix of Khaki Green and 71.075 Sand Ivory.  I applied a very small amount of chipping and scratches with a manual brush. A light dry brush on the straight line edges brought out some of the detail.

One thing that I have noticed when reading a lot of memoirs and other accounts of tank units is that the tanks themselves did not seem to last very long before being destroyed, so it seems strange to me to paint too much superficial damage onto them, especially rust effects, because the vehicles seemed not to survive long enough to become rusty.  Perhaps some German vehicles on the Eastern Front, perhaps, but the pace of advance and almost daily combat in NW Europe seem to make it implausible that they survived long enough to become as well weathered as some of us seem to paint them.

Once I had finished painting all the acrylics, I sprayed the whole model in matt varnish and applied the decals. Next step was to use an oil-based dark wash from MIG Productions to place shadow into all the crevices and around rivets etc. Another oil-based step I have been experimenting with is to use highly diluted oil paints (white, yellow, brown and green in this case) to give the flat armoured plates a mottled appearance. I was initially put off this technique because it seemed hard to do, but after a couple of experiments, I found it really easy and I think the results look good. It replaces the need to "over-chip" the model and creates IMHO the impression of a vehicle that has been on the battlefield in the thick of it.

Here's a photo of a Japanese Ha-Go tank, which I took on a visit to Bovington Tank Museum a couple of years ago, which I think illustrates the mottling effect (in between the camo scheme).

I feel slightly ashamed that I cannot confidently identify this vehicle (a Panzer Mk.I command tank?), but the mottling effect in both the grey and brown colours is evident.

Anyway, back to my Stuart...

I used some "realistic light lenses" from AK Interactive too. Decals were obtained from Company B.

Maybe I'll be able to get some gaming in over this summer as lockdown measures are starting to ease a little?

Universal Carriers and Caunter Camouflage

To build out the support units for my Greek army for Iron Cross, I've added some British anti-tank units mounted in universal carriers. I have painted three resin carriers from Die Waffenkammer; I'm not a great fan of resin because I have had many bad experiences of paint flaking off no matter how well I have prepared the surface before applying the paint.

One of the reasons that I chose the Die Waffenkammer models was that they came with four crew members per carrier plus lots of stowage. I'm in the process of painting the miniatures at the moment. I'll add a little bit more weathering too to dull down the newly applied decals.

There are some great photos on the web of carriers in Greece painted in the "Caunter" scheme, so I ordered the 'British Caunter Colors' paint set from Vallejo and duly applied it. Having read around the Internet on the subject of caunter, it seems to be catnip for web trolls, but having used the colours supplied by Vallejo, and read both sides of the argument, I feel like I have achieved a historically accurate result and think they look pretty good. I even think that I have used the correct shapes! ;-)

Painting caunter is hard though! I had originally planned to use an airbrush on the carriers, but it requires so much fiddly masking that I ended up painting the straight lines by eye and a steady hand.

I've started to paint a couple of A13 Cruisers for the desert in caunter too...a bit more work to get them to a finished state though. Masking the A13s was easier, so I've been using the airbrush to spray the straight lines.

Operation Marita - German invasion of Greece

I've been working on painting up a German invasion force and defending Greeks, supported by some Brits, for a few months now. The armies shown here have been put together for Iron Cross, where a handful of miniatures represents an infantry or support unit and one vehicle per vehicle unit.

Other than adding tufts and flock to the bases, I finally finished all of the miniatures this afternoon. Here is the whole of the Allied forces, awaiting some armoured support...

The core of the force is made of an HQ squad...

...and four infantry platoons

A sniper is really useful when defending, which I am expecting to be doing in the majority of scenarios with this Greek army.

A couple of CV-35s (captured from the Italians), which are useful for putting down heavy fire onto infantry.

A couple of infantry support units: a medium machine gun (again, good for putting down a weight of fire and stopping infantry assaults) and a mortar team, which I mainly use to cause units-in-cover to move and lose their cover bonus, which is especially useful for disrupting support weapons and limiting their rate of fire.

A Skoda M.15 75mm mountain gun, an anti-tank rifle, and an 'Elephantino' anti-tank gun to provide some heavier fire against advancing panzers.

In support of the Greeks, I've got some extra British infantry mounted in a lorry. I've also got a British 2 pounder anti-tank gun on the painting pile to provide extra AT punch.

I've also got a few more armoured vehicles to paint for the British

• a platoon of universal carriers to add further mobility to the reserves, 
• a couple of Vickers MkVI's just for the nuisance value, and
• a couple of A13's which have a reasonable chance against the panzers.

I plan on making some terrain pieces too: trench works to give the defenders some protection and barbed wire and minefields to slow them down a little and channel the enemy's advance onto the AT guns.

On the attack are the Germans with 3 x Panzer 38(t)s, 2 x Panzer IVs and 6 x Panzer IIIs...

...and 1 x HQ unit, 6 x infantry squads (3 in trucks), a mortar team, an HMG team, a Pak36 AT gun, 2 x anti-tank rifle teams, and 2 x teams of Panzerjagers armed with AT grenades. A formidable force!

A selection of German armour. I have no idea how the Greeks are going to stop that lot!  I might need to "dig" a few anti-tank ditches in addition to making the other terrain pieces to stop the Greeks from being overrun immediately.

German panzers scouting ahead of the main force...

Greek anti-tank units concealed in the pine forest lie in wait...

I will crack on with making the terrain pieces now and also finish off the British armoured units and then maybe by then we will be out of lockdown and get some gaming in.

Greek Mobile Support (CV-35s)

I've finished painting a pair of captured CV 35 tankettes for my Greek force. They are armed with dual machine guns, so no match for the German panzers, but useful as mobile pillboxes to suppress the attacking infantry.

They are a boring green, but I did add some hand-painted national identification flags to the hull sides. ;-)

These tankettes are pretty small - some Greek infantry figures alongside the tankettes for comparison.

More Greeks to come soon (plus some I have already painted here). The tankettes are from Company B; figures from Great Escape Games.