Club Night Wednesday 3rd November

In preparation for the tournament at the weekend Luke and I took our armies up the club to try them out on some different terrain as we know we were not going to get to play all our games in the nice open desert. We decided to play on the Russian front and diced up our terrain and the mission of hold the line with the Italian defending.

As the British surged forward the first Italian guns opened up, with the 90mm destroying a pair of crusaders and another falling to the ambushing self propelled 47s.

However this seemed to be the high point for the armoured engagement. The 90mms fell to 25 pounder bombardment and the 75s failed to penetrate any further crusaders while they gradually took losses from the crusaders and the flanking motor rifle platoon. After the loss of the 90mms on my right I moved the assault engineers forward to hold off the British infantry, but with their MGs and supporting artillery they stemmed this counter attack and drove back the engineers.

On the other flank the motorcilisti platoon and light tanks roared forward to retake the furthest objective now the covering 75mm guns had been suppressed and it was open to the enemy. They won the initial engagement with the British armoured cars but when the crusaders armed with 6 pounders arrived on the scene there was nothing they could do to resist them, and with covering artillery the infantry could not get close enough to use its anti-tank grenades.

With both flanks beaten back the Italians broke and the British took the win. But would it be an omen for the weekend when the results really mattered.