Italy: Soft Underbelly, Scenario 2: The Pigs Snout

 

After months of prep, the big day was a finally here. Possibly one element of prep that I should have done, was read the scenario and special rules for my own army, more on this later

The goal was a simple one for the Italians, keep the British Commandoes from blowing up the gun emplacements. The real task was for the British, they had eleven turns to get to each of the strongpoints and plant some explosives. We weren't sure whether we had to roll for the explosions effectiveness but since they had so much to do, we figures the guns would automatically be destroyed. Thankfully for the British, the assault was to take place at night, neither of us had used the Night fighting rules and it took a bit of getting used to. But they were very useful at allowing unhindered movement towards objectives. they also really reduced the effectiveness of ranged weapons that I was counting on. so many times I cackled with glee on a potentially devastating volley of fire only to find that the target couldn't be seen. Curse you darkness!

The Battlefield: We had stuck very very close to the map above, Commander Roy did a great job on the table and my guns and barbed wire fitted right in

I choose to deploy the bunkers with clear line of sight to the British deployment area, completely underestimating the night time rules

Deployment: Commander Roy representing the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) deployed in the south west corner, his troops led by the heroic Paddy Mayne and all looking remarkably fresh after climbing up a cliff face to the gun batteries.

a super sneaky COPP team deployed in-between the two batteries, a single shot from this guy would be enough to encourage whole squads to surrender

The Italians representing two platoon of Divisione Costiera, were to be split between the two batteries. Each would be treated as a different force with separate dice. A large squad was placed in a building facing the direction the raider would be coming from, and two MMG teams and two small squads with LMGs were set up in the pill boxes.

Preparatory Mortar Bombardment: Oh the horror, normally not overly concerned about preparatory bombardments, this would prove to be the first indicator that all was not going to plain sailing for Italians. If the bombardment was to cause a hit, I'd have to check the unit didn't pack up their belonging and head back to Italy, on 1 or 2 on a D6 the whole unit would flee. 

Things were initially looking pretty good after the bombardment only removed a handful of barbed wire fences

once we started calculating the effect on infantry it was a completely different story. about three large squads lost the will to continue and took for the hills, along with the lieutenant in the first platoon and the AA gun in the second. Everyone else was pinned up to their eyeballs. This was when I made my first mistake, only infantry squads were actually effected by the Surrender rules. A number of the team units removed from the table should have remained. Additionally we applied bombardment to both platoons rather than just the first one as book states

2nd Lieutenant's friend taking a mortar to the face and him running home

My biggest concern at this point was that the troops would prove to be quite unresponsive with pin markers due to the shirker rule and even more so with the lack of lieutenant in the first platoon. What made it significantly worse was the Italian special rule Avanti Savoia kicking in, and reducing the whole armies morale to six from the damage from the bombardment. It wasn't until much later did we find out that there was a new special rule for the scenarios in this book that would have only reduced moral by one. Roy had mentioned a couple of times that he thought I was wrong about the Avanti Savoia rule, but I was concerned it was Allied Propaganda. I'd also made it much harder by applying the shirker rules to all teams, not just infantry. 

The one blessing that the Italians had going for them was that the British could not run on the first turn due to having to advance cautiously, so for the first couple of turns, everyone tried to shed pins by morale tests and remaining down if these were failed.

The British advance on their shattered foe

After everything started to remove pins, we were then treated to an artillery strike that unusually arrived in time and pinned my AA gun back up again

The COPP team was able to snipe away at any targets of opportunity and remain undetected with his suppressed weapon not causing any noise or muzzle flash.

Closer and closer, surprisingly some of my frontline troops were still undetectable as they still had down orders and weren't able to fire, so were practically invisible. At least until we understood the minimum distance rule for darkness

The combat engineers have moved to the flank under darkness and toasted a full squad of troops who then failed their morale test and fled. thankfully the engineers have not brought enough fuel for the whole game and the flamethrower handler leaves the squad to return to base to fill in a requisition order for more petrol. The rest of the squad will completely destroy the occupants of the first pillbox in close combat without them getting off a shot.

Second platoon use their time well, they are unable to move until contacted but I was able to get ambush orders on them once pins were cleared.

The perimeter in Battery One is breached but I managed to pull off the cheekiest mortar hit of all time, very close to minimum range and a lucky six, removing quite a large percentage of the combat engineer squad

The mortar was very quickly silenced by a quick charge. A couple of the smaller damaged squads were left behind to plant explosives and Paddy and half the teams head to the 2 battery still under cover of darkness as night time continued.

Paddy and two squads of raiders lurk behind a hut waiting for an opportunity to put their SMGs to good use. Very aware that darkness will lift soon, Commander Roy takes a chance and runs Paddy around the hut and into the open

Somehow the squad on ambush spot them, and despite the inexperienced shooting, managed to score enough hits to take out the three man team in one go.  The same fate is applied to another squad shortly after. Avanti Savoia!

Load bangs are heard as this point as the raiders at the first set of gun pits in Battery One have set off the first of the demolition charges and I'm soon down three guns

Turn nine and we're down to the last slice of cake but morning has finally broken

Furious firefights kick off, with the COPP eventually getting taken out with a million shots from a squad on ambush but both remaining Italian troop squads vanish at the sound of gunfire soon after. 2nd platoon's Lieutenant runs to the barbed wire to prepare to sell his life dearly, with no infantry squads remaining and for some reason both officers brought nothing more than pistols. 

Another Gun pit is taken out, bringing the total to four, enough for a well earned draw

But that's the end of turn eleven and the end of the game

The Italians had lost an incredible amount of units throughout the game but somehow they had delayed the British enough to make it very difficult to take out all the objectives. I had worried that the poor morale of my troops would make the game quite frustrating to play, but good humour and the occasional lucky role made it very enjoyable and tense. Despite the amount of mistakes I had made through poor understanding of my rules, the Italians manged to hang on until the end. Commander Roy is no doubt still kicking himself for loosing his Major at the most climatic point of the game. Many thanks to the team at Warlord for another well put together scenario

The next scenario is a street fighting one with a platoon of light tanks versus an infantry platoon. thankfully that means I only have five tanks to paint. Commander Roy has a full ranger army to do! But looking forward to the fourth scenario I hope to get a start on an enormous amount of Fallschirmjager 

Run Up to Pigs Snout: Part Two The Figures

 

The Italian Side

One of the major issues I've suffered from when carrying out projects in the past is managing my own attention span. I'll jump from shiny new project to another, leaving a trail of unfinished models or adding to my pile of shame. In order to stay on target I introduced a technique from work and fashioned my own sprint board. All the projects I would like to do at some point go under the Ice Box sticker and the ones i'm working on go under the 'To Do' sticker. The order dictates the order I carry them out. I decided that monthly I could review the order and add as much to the Ice Box as I wanted

So far it seems to be working, although it might be decades before I can clear my wall

I'd been wanting to do an Italian army for years, a couple of things were holding me back, with no plastics, they were going to be very dear and the Bolt Action national rules weren't very good. I'd previous run a veteran Italian  Paratrooper army that I'd enjoyed but never painted, but for years I'd wanted to field a regular force in the desert. Then a couple of years ago, Wargames Atlantic announced a pre-order for their plastic Italians and I went in big for two boxes immediately. Rather frustratingly Warlord games announced their Italian Plastics in what seemed like the next day.

With the advent of Warlord's plastic release, their started adding tester sprues to mail orders and so with a handful of additional purchases i had a very large infantry army for Pigs Snout. The scenario called for everyone to be inexperienced and and shirkers, this makes a basic five man squad 15points. So i was in for a crazy big batch paint to provide 1000 points. I lent into weapon teams and pillbox to bulk out the force a bit otherwise the figure count would have been twice as much.

A couple of niggles appeared on assembly, turns out Wargames Atlantic are a bit shy on their research and didn't include LMG loaders, It doesn't matter so much for Bolt Action as the loader can change, but its nice to model. Then even more confusingly the MMGs didn't seem to have an ammo boxes for the guns. a large rectangle was included on the sprue, but I think this was perhaps meant to represent the AA version of the gun

They're also not great in providing instructions, although, having some support weapons on the sprue was a nice touch.

When it came to the painting, it seemed like I was a lot more comfortable with the desert colours of Italian uniform, but it was likely that these would not have been worn in Sicily. I thought I'd get away with a ragtag approach and mix the uniforms about, as long as there was consistency with basing and backpacks etc. I also couldn't find any reference to the uniform colour that Warlord suggested on the their otherwise excellent painting guide. I think the colour they showed was the fatigues, I quite liked the colour, but thought I'd stick to the Green Grey mentioned in the Osprey Men at Arms books

Once i'd got the basic colour scheme finalised, i attached the models to shot glasses to make them easier to hold. i first painted the desert colours on the older metal warlord models and anyone with a pith helmet

then Painted everyone else with Green Grey, and Olive Grey for helmets. Then started the slog. I endless selected a colour and stuck to painting all the models with that colour until all the models were finished. selected another colour and did the same. for some of the larger painting areas it took a couple of hours. but on average I was getting an element painted on the entire army a night

Finally dipped in strong tone

It must be very dull to look at but you can get the picture. eventually I used Vallejo diorama texture which I love, and added the excellent base ready products from Geek Gaming

It was the first time I'd used the sealant but it seems to work really well and dries overnight. Overall i think it took me about two months to finish the army, it would never hold up in conventional bolt action games but it would provide a good back bone for Case Blue. Also to give me a gut punch, the night before the scenario was to take place, I found I was short half a dozen troopers, AAARRRGGGG. a couple of hours later, I the remaining deserters rounded up. I didn't have time to add the magic dipping sauce so these were just painted with Strong Tone Ink

The British

Commander Roy was kind enough to send me some pictures of the progress in his force to keep me enthused whilst I was battling my way through the Italian horde

I wasn't sure what to make of this pic, I think he included it to ensure I was clear who had Air Superiority 

Snazzy Raiders

Paddy Mayne and his lads

the commandoes out commanding

Small but deadly team taking shape