Italy: Soft Underbelly, Scenario One: Biazza Ridge

 

In a recreation of the US 505th Regimental Combat Team action in Sicily we were to meet and attempt the first scenario in Warlord Games Italy Soft Under Belly book. Both Commander Roy and I have had great fun playing missions out of the Stalingrad book and were looking forward to sunnier climbs in the Sicilian summer sun.

The objective was clear Colonel James Gavin was to take objectives east of the railway station. The Germans in the guise of the Hermann Goring Division Kampfgruppe East were to deny the sneaky yanks by grabbing the same objectives. 

Initial thoughts from the German side was that this would be a an easy mission. I'd have two Tigers to dominate the table and take out any armour and that I'd have a good chance at holding the most northerly objective as I was deploying nearby

   

For my initial deployment I went with a full infantry squad and a PAK 40 over looking the village to take out tanks when they arrived 

The US Airborne wasted no time and quickly took the first objective

Clever placement of the senior officers in the stone buildings meant that Commander Roy was able to maintain the initiative by snap to it orders from a position of safety

Very quickly the tables began to turn, the multitude of additional orders called up a group of three Bazooka teams.  My initial confidence was shattered when the first Tiger took a bazooka in the face and blew up

The German advance began to slow up immediately. After a couple of turns getting shot up in the middle of the board and a couple of the larger HGD squads turning yellow bellied the AA truck went on the rampage and was aggressively hunting out small infantry teams. the additional pen was proving very useful in breaking apart veteran troops too

At the top of the below picture you can see the US quickly moving around to the second objective, but German trucks on the way to reinforce and counter attack

The Pak 40 was relegated to guarding the last objective, the supply dump. Its sole job was to stay on ambush and destroy the first squad coming around the building

The US infantry taking the second objective, poor Hans with the sore head in the woods

Parachute Rifle squad on its way to take the second objective

The remaining Tiger began to wait out the arriving Shermans, where were they?

Truck Assault coming

Sneaky mortar, getting lucky strikes

At this point it was very tense, i had managed to break a look of the US force with very accurate mortar fire from the other end of the table and some lucky heavy anti tank fire. The last surprise of the game was the airstrike that i had forgotten about for the last couple of turns and had been refusing to appear. it eventually arrived and with amazing accuracy landed near practically all the units i had prepared to rush the two objectives I needed to scoop the win.

Sadly the pinning that was dished out was enough to completely scupper the Germans counter assault. First scenario to the Allies 

An incredibly enjoyable scenario that could really have gone either way. a great deal of work had gone into getting the game on the table but both of us felt it was worth it, we know had an even bigger hill to climb for scenario Two: Storming the Pigs Snout. at this point I had no Italians, no suitable models for objectives and Commander Roy had no Commandos

Run up to Biazza

 First scheduled scenario from the Soft under belly book is Biazza Ridge. I've ended up taking the side of the axis in the campaign so thankfully I had a great deal of WW2 Germans in 28mm. mostly because when I first started playing Bolt Action in first edition I had purchased a massive amount of them in lead from Black tree design. these remain one of my favourite armies as I painted them very early on and played with them so much. 

it was quite a shock to find that despite having what I thought was a massive German army was in fact not enough for scenario. The scenario calls for the German Force to be from the Kampfgruppe East HGD selector whilst is a largely infantry based selector. I could have used a Tiger to bulk out the list, but the scenario calls for two tiger tanks already so I had to get a couple of squads fleshed out. I had decided early on that any scenarios were to be played with nice and fluffy lists as much as possible, this largely meant that squads were to be full and contain LMGs, which in this case, meant two LMGs per squad. This was to be an issue as I was short a fair few LMG teams. luckily I had a fair few unpainted Black tree LMG teams and was able to scavenge some more from plastic warlord kits. this was the perfect opportunity to paint some objectives too for a little bit of battleground story telling. 

I tend to use plastic shot glasses blue tacked to bases for holding models whilst I batch paint large amounts of figures, seems to help stave of hand cramps and meant the model can be manipulated much easier

I chose to include a PK40 as i needed a bit of antitank punch, I thought I'd try and paint the crew separately from the gun and combine them later. I'm not sure if this added any time savers but I think I'll try again

After completing the infantry, I realised I was very short transport as the scenario would call for my force to rapidly reinforce the ridge so quickly painted up two trucks. Also just for fun, I added an AA truck to the list of things to do. Thankfully I had a tiger Tank and Commander Roy had a second.

My Opponent for the Campaign, Mr Commander Roy, had the uphill struggle in preparing for this scenario as he had very little in the way of US forces and the book calls for quite specific forces