Club Night 6th August

Luke and I decided it had been a while since we had done a Flames of War and so decided to do another desert clash, but for a bit of a change we swapped sides and took quite different armies. Luke took a fusileri force, with masses of indirect for support (4 batteries, 2 artillery and 2 mortar), while I went for the other end of the spectrum, with a very small Australian divisional Cavalry force. Would quality or quantity win the day.

The first scenario we played was very fortunate for me as it was an encounter battle so it forced the Italians to attack and prevented them from digging in (to begin with at least). The down side was that due to the small nature of my force I had to put half of my precious platoons in reserve, so I only started with a carrier patrol and a 25 pounder battery on table.

On my right my carriers advanced and bought as much fire as they could to bear on the infantry in front of them, while on my left the artillery had to fend for itself as the Italian engineer platoon stormed forward to try too close with them. The difference in quality quickly began to show, as Italian forces failed to dig-in, became pinned and remained pinned and failed to press their attack home convincingly. With casualties mounting up and reserve slow in arriving the Italian force broke and prepared for another battle.

This time it was a cauldron, with the Italians defending. This should be m,ore in their favour as they can start dug in with all their heavy artillery and their 88s and in place and firing before my attack could commence. This immediately caused casualties on my lightly armoured force. At least on the other flank it was going better as my artillery out-ranged the small arms it was opposing and was able to shall the emplaced Italians and avoid much return fire.

On the other side I used the reconnaissance ability of the carriers to move around and cause the Italian artillery problems. Every time they pivoted to engage a carrier unit moved round the flank to machine gun them where their gun shields could not protect the crew.

As the allied tanks arrived I then pushed in and began to overrun the Italian infantry in their positions. Despite struggling to pass a motivation test with my fearless veteran troops I pushed on and drove off the fusileri platoons and the engineers coming to their rescue. However casualties were beginning to mount and if they got too high the Aussies would have to break off, as the C-in-C had already had his tank shot from under him and then was killed in the carrier he had transfered to, However the Italians were already having to take company morale checks, but a fearless conscript Commander was not breaking off.

So the Aussies stooped to a low level and drove forward in their armoured vehicles and gunned down the Italian commander so when next called in to take a test the Italians failed and fell back from the battlefield leaving the Cavalry victorious again.

I really enjoyed these games and it got me inspired to get on with my painting again and I have managed to get all my FoW base-coated, although the Italian colours are a bit dark and after posting on TMP the general consensus seems to be to lighten the colours, so I will give that a go and see how a more bleached out base colour looks.