Team Yankee - No Retreat?

This week at the uni club Bryan and I played Team Yankee, this time wanting to play in a semi urban setting. So no hills or rises, few crops, and only small patches of woodland, but lots of roads and hard standing.

I stuck to my usual Soviet Tank list, but lost the Hinds to emphasise the armour, whilst Bryan picked a US Mechanised list. We rolled for the mission and 'No Retreat' came up. Now despite having Mech, Bryan wanted to be the attacker, even given the open nature of the terrain...

...as he reckoned that, with the deep immediate reserves rule in this scenario, I would be in strife defending with only 1 tank platoon! However, since I obviously wanted to attack, (Urrah Pobeda Comrade!), we rolled for it and I got to attack. Could be an interesting future scenario though! Anyway Bryan got his revenge by deploying a dirty great minefield right in front of my objective. Capitalist running dog!

In this scenario, with the defender's deployment zone halfway across the depth of the table, my beloved BMP-2 recon platoon's 'Spearhead' rule was of limited value, but it did mean I could deploy one of my T-72 troops reasonably close to the nearest objective, in the cover of a nearby woodlot. And none of my tanks bogged!

I may as well tell you know, as I was too stunned to take any pictures, but my next move was to attack his Vulcan ADs with my SU-24s. Suffice it to say none returned from that mission, and the Enemy Air Defence  remained distinctly unSuppressed! - albeit now somewhat superfluous as I had left my Hinds behind! Any fire support would now be dependent on the Red God of War...



Nothing daunted, and with Bryan failing to mobilise any reserves in his first move, the Red Tide continued to flow...

Until we fetched up against the minefield! At this point my formation commander...

And I had some tough decisions to make - 'straight up the middle with bags of smoke' was even more foolhardy than usual with the minefield, and a left flanking attack continue in constricting terrain.



However the right flanking route, nice and open, would be the obvious place for his tank platoon to eventually appear, and would give his ITOW missiles a lovely kill sack. I was also conscious that Bryan had Copperhead rounds available to his guns...

In the interests of time I went with the open flank, hoping to clear the open ground quickly...

And this paid off, as his Abrams had some pretty poor dice rolls and only picked off one of my T-72s, despite 8 saboted darts heading towards them at Mach speed. I avoided further kills from the Abrams by assaulting the infantry in the woods which were guarding the approaches to the objective.

Probably not normally a sensible move against unpinned infantry...



Despite some heavy 122mm howitzer bombardment throughout the previous moves and some direct 125mm cannon fire from the follow up T-72 platoon...

The US mech lost some brave men, and I lost two T-72s abandoned as bogged down when my platoon was forced to break off...

Elsewhere, the minefield had effectively prevented my remaining forces to bring their weight to bear, and, with time running out, and a couple of other interesting looking games to investigate, I conceded the game. However a useful evening with several firsts - minefields, and copperheads, and a bit more experience of armour vs infantry assaults. We also both agreed that the 'No Retreat' scenario gave an interesting game.