Another trip to Jonathan's games room for a big World War II scenario. Sword Beach was the code name of one of the five main landing beaches in Operation Neptune, which was the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord (the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944). Stretching 8 km from Ouistreham to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer it was the farthest east of the landing points and around 15 km from Caen. The initial landings were achieved with low casualties, but the British forces ran into heavily defended areas behind the beachhead. The British landings were the only Allied sectors that faced attack by German Panzer Divisions on 6 June 1944.
The defending Germans were played by Jonathan and another Jonathan. The invading Brits were Adrian and James. The ruleset was Rapid Fire, which made for a smooth and fluid game, getting through 22 turns over the course of the day.
Jonathan had set up his excellent home-made D-Day tiles covering about 8 by 10 feet, chock-full of scenery.
The British landed between Ouistreham...
and La Brèche d'Hermanville, both heavily fortified with bunkers and barbed wire.
The British invaded in ten waves, arriving in odd numbered turns and landing in the following turn.
The first turns were spent clearing the beaches of mines whilst trying to avoid German artillery strikes.
There were a few initial losses to mines on the beach and artillery, including destroying one of the British flails.
Adrian successfully repaired one of his tanks...
...and then made great progress against La Brèche...
The beach was soon full of landing craft and advancing infantry and armour...
James took the indirect approach to Ouistreham leading the charge with his fearless bulldozer, which trampled the barbed wire whilst dud panzerfaust shots pinged off its shovel.
The British airborne who dropped in on the Germans holding the Orne bridge put up a valiant effort but were eventually overrun by reinforcing Germans.
British tanks were soon making headway inland...
...but German Panzers were arriving down the Caen road...
Repairing tanks as he went, Adrian pushed on and engaged the Panzers, scoring some good strikes. On the left, James used his engineers to take out the bunkers in Ouistreham and started taking the bunkers further inland.
At the end of turn 22, the British had taken the two towns and several bunker positions, and were fighting hard for the ridge. Although there were a further 10 turns remaining in the scenario, the British had achieved a minor victory.
The liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation had begun. The forcefield protection provided to the British by Toby's Bionicles may have helped...
Lastly, the now-obligatory video footage...just 1m30s but with a classic comment from Jonathan at the end (although unfortunately MovieMaker insists on saving my widescreen footage as 4:3).
(Embedded YouTube script won't work if you're reading this in e-mail, so click the link at the end to read this in your browser).
1 comment:
Good write up James and lovely pics.
This was a great game. Jonathan's terrain (I particularly liked the barbed wire entanglements...) and beautifully painted 20mm figures went hand in hand with a very smooth ruleset. Really good fun. Highlight was storming the bunker complexes after some knockout naval artillery. Low point was getting my AVRE repair vehicle into position to fix an immobilised DD Sherman, only for the repaired tank to be immediately obliterated by German artillery. And playing the game on 6 June itself made for a memorable day out. Thanks Jonathan!
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