US Armored Rifles vs. SS Westfalen

Mailed in by Luke and Tarzan

The table

Oh... the humanity!!!  You ever have one of those battles where you know its going to be a giant yawn?  Well this was one for Luke and Eric. It started out with the random roll of Free-for-All which can be a bad mission for certain match ups. Eric had slow campy SS Westfalen war criminals and Luke had a bizarre tank destroyer ARO mix. We could both see exactly how this fight was going to down and I for one was not looking forward to it.  Eric was going sit and camp and Luke had to dictate the action and attack.  Any other tactic for either side was out of the question.

Eric's List Remagen SS Westfalen List:

HQ SMG Pzfaust
4 Trap Teams
1 Sniper
2 Panzerschrek teams

SS Aufklrung
SS Aufklrung
SS HMG platoon
Kingtiger
KingTiger
Volks light Arty battery.. 6 guns.

Luke's ARP Remagen List:  CV
Command
2 Batteries of Priests with upgraded M4A3 OP Shermans
2 ARP
4 Hell Cat Tank Destroyers
Cavalry Recon with Stuart

Luke deploys

Eric deploys

I set up to be able to push from both sides.  I was fairly confident that Eric would not be much for the attack with trained infantry.  The Tank Destroyers were positioned a little off center to react to wherever they were needed.  In this case the threat of them was more important than their actual combat effectiveness.

Most of this game had me dropping smoke templates on the King Tigers.  The problem with using Priests exclusively is that the odds of being able to take out a single King Tiger is not so great.  So you have to make the choice in go for the semi-sure thing with smoke or take the bad odds of being able to try to kill one.  Oddly enough I failed to range in with smoke many times during the course of this game which only added to my slow crawl across the board.

Sniper!!  Why oh why...

The sniper quickly became very annoying, so he had to go.

Panzerfaust ambush... very weaksauce.

Slowly pushing forward on my right flank and trying to use the buildings for cover.

That's one dead sniper!

The push on the left started going very well.  The most damaging thing to me was Eric's AT gun battery fire.  Dug in the bombardment is not very effective.  In the open, that fire power 6 does not matter at all.

Bailed out a couple of times, but no kills.

Two good assaults on Eric's infantry and he is reeling.  The trap teams are all, but ineffective with so many .50 cals and MG's to hold them off.  They die fairly quickly.

We have been playing a slow game.  At this point we are over three and a half hours into it with many breaks, including dinner.  Wit the famous "F$%@ It" move and nothing to lose I pop the TD's and go for it on both flanks.

And not so much.  My ARP's advance, but just cant take enough ground.

Eric takes out my OP Shermans and skillfully keeps his King Tigers from getting killed.

Making his stormtrooper rolls several turns in a row and with the hill making me not be able to maneuver to get side shots the TD's die a slow death.

One final ARP assault ends up killing Eric's infantry, but my ARP fails its motivation and runs too, leaving his KT solidly on the objective.  My assaults on the right flank are successful, but he still has a lot of firepower in and around his objective. 

We end up calling this a 2-3 draw to Eric.

Eric's thoughts.... This was a pretty dull game for me as Luke had to do all the work. Westfalen is not fun for me, don't get me wrong I think the Westfalen is a decent list its just not my playing style. To do well with them you have to sit still and let your opponent come to you, which all fine in a defensive battle but free-for -all it is different story.  You don't have much that can threaten the opponents objective other than King Tigers and if they leave babysitting duty of the Trained infantry you could be in deep trouble. I did really like the volks artillery unit, that is a solid outfit. 

Luke's thoughts...

These Westfalen lists are pretty cool, but seem to lack the ability to move.  As such the Westfalen player seems to always be defending in fair fight missions.  I changed my list from having the 155mm guns to give myself a little more flexibility in maneuver, but I found myself missing the AT 5 FP 2.  With that the King Tigers would have died and I would have been able to move with relative ease.  Lastly, I think the fact that we were both tired and were playing casually had an impact on the game.  Not even half way through we were both ready for the game to be over and did some things we may not have normally done in order to move the game to it's conclusion.  Regardless, It's always fun to play with Eric and it was still an enjoyable game.

These two clown-shoes can be heard on the WWPD podcast ...god knows why anybody would listen to them after this battle...