Progress Report 4/13/13: The Red Barricades Project

We had three Red Barricades regulars in attendance for the Aprill meeting of the Red Barricades Project in Anaheim.

Jim Cotugno and I had already done the Russian set-up for the October 27th CG date, and after we had our 'units on the board it was Dan Plachta's turn to hatch a plan and set up the Germans. We got the CG underway after our usual St. Crispin's lunch. With Dan as the only German player and the high density of units on both sides, the pace of play was a little slow. Jim and I had set up the Russians heavily forward on the eastern flank, poised to launch an assault into the Main Mechanical Workshop. The plan was to force the Germans to react in that sector to draw off units from any other attack they had planned.

Dan responded to this strategy, not surprisingly, by launching a powerful German assault between the factories and the river. The German force in this sector includes Sturm squads, a Pioneer Company, an OBA mission, and armor, overwatched by a kill stack in Ludnikov's Headquarters. The Germans are strung out fairly thin in the central factories, but overwatched there with three more kill stacks. A secondary combined arms assault is poised on the German right, just to the south of the Bread Factory.

Dan caught a bad break on the initial wind change DR, when the overcast weather turned to Rain, eliminating the option for Smoke. It didn't seem to change anything on the east flank, where his assault engineers went in hard and fast. But on the west flank, the Germans held up their infantry assault, and were content with shelling the Russians in the Bread Factory with their Pz IV's. We decided to wrap it up after completing the top of turn 1. There are 5 Russian squads in the dirt cup and no German casualties (yet.) That's was not surprising to Jim and I; it was a price we were prepared to pay for setting up so far forward on the east flank. And the Russian half of turn 1 is coming up. With over 170 Russian-occupied locations, we're quite prepared to dish out a little hurt of our own. Stay tuned…