WARNING: This scenario works best with an umpire. If you plan to use an umpire, then only the umpire himself should read the full scenario details. Each player reads his own brief. The umpire needs to read both briefs and the scenario notes.
German brief
You have the following forces:
Reasonable lot of decent infantry, with a fair few AT HEAT weapons.
A few light vehicles and decent AA guns (with some AT capability), one AT gun.
You deploy in area 1, from the left of the table, as far as the dotted
line. Half of your infantry must be deployed in the buildings. All
of your forces may be deployed hidden.
Your troops are tired, after much contact with the enemy, and are now
resting in accommodation in this area. Enemy aircraft have been a threat,
and so you have wisely camouflaged your camp, and do not move around much
by day, and you have AA guns which you should position to protect the
buildings. Enemy paratroopers are an expected threat, and two
behind-the-lines drops have been reported recently. You are not now on
the front line, and your priority is the resting of your men, but you must
take precautions against enemy infiltration and air attack. You have a
fuel dump and a radar station to guard. This area has been fought across
several times, and an old defensive line exists which has been mined.
Engineers will turn up next week to remove the mines, until then, better
order your men to avoid that area, since the maps of the minefields are
unreliable, and the ground is very open there, so troops in the area might
be seen from the air.
Allied side brief
You have the following forces:
- Good off-table artillery.
- Some good engineers.
- Some infantry.
- A couple of light scouting AFVs.
- A VERY strong tank force.
You are part of the first wave of Operation Scaffolding. Much is being
done to confuse the enemy, and surprise and speed are important. You
travel through the night, as part of the rapidly-advancing column, and
then go ahead at dawn to remove the anti-tank obstacles which Intelligence
says exist in the area of your part in the operation. You come on the
board anywhere along side 2. You are to clear a path through the
obstacles, for the armoured column to follow. The column itself will wait
off-table until you personally radio back that the path is clear. Expect
some resistance, as troops are stationed in this area. You have artillery
priority for the opening stage (the clearing of the path), after which
artillery units will be assigned other priorities. Once the column is
through the obstacles, escort it across the board and mop up any
resistance.
Umpire Notes
The German commander must realise what is going on, and the size of the
threat. The fall of the attacker's artillery may tell him what's going
on. He may have the "game mentality" which tells him that the attacker
will have a force which "balances" his, for a "fair" fight. This
mentality is not historical and will not help him. The tank column is
very strong and once all through the gap will be devastating. The
defender must prevent the engineers from doing their work.
I suggest that engineers, advancing and equipped with this particular
task in mind, should be able to remove a stand's width per engineering
stand of dragons' teeth on a roll of a 6 at the start of the phasing
initiative following a previous initiative entirely spent next to the
obstacles, then 5,6 for the next, then 4,5,6 for subsequent (for "Spanish
riders" (girder jacks/caltrops), +1 to the roll - so you could have weaker
points in the line with Spanish riders, but these might be more exposed to
fire). If ever a 1 is rolled, that particular stand's width of AT
obstacle proves too well-made to be bothered with - move on to another
section.
Whether you have mines and wire as well in the line is up to you. I read
recently that mines and wire were often very difficult to clear using
artillery, and that often the cratering just made things worse. If you
are very mean, you may say that there are only AT mines there, which the
engineers will not set off, but tanks will (if you go for this option,
then the engineers could still spot the mines if their player specifically
states that he will look for them).
The defender must realise that the thing to do is ignore most of his
brief, and get as many troops down to defend the line as possible, and he
may choose to get his AA gun and AT guns into position to face whatever is
going to come through that gap. He may of course decide to use the
advantage of hidden defence, and defend in depth. This
would be disastrous. He'd be much more likely to win this one if he
revealed his troops (by moving them) into position to do something to
prevent a gap forming in the line. A good tactic might be to position AT/AA
guns to fire at a likely gap-to-be, then wait for a tank to occupy the gap
and blow it up there, blocking the gap again.
The attacker would do well to work very quickly with his engineers, and
try to get infantry through the line ahead of them, to obscure what
they're up to, and confuse the enemy by threatening false objectives. If
he radios to the column to come on too early, then he may only have one
gap for the tanks to move through, which may become blocked by a
knocked-out tank. He must radio himself, and to do this, he must (a) be
alive, and (b) be able to see the gap in the line himself.
So as not to spoil the surprise. The allied player should not at first
stand at the end of the table where his forces will later come on, nor
should his figures be placed in a convenient place for getting them onto
the table there. The German player should be led to fear attacks from
any direction.
The allied side has perhaps half to 2/3 as much infantry as the Germans.
Some of the men were delayed, and they weren't expecting so many enemy
troops to be stationed here. Their commander must use them wisely, and
may sacrifice any number of them for the sake of getting the column
through. Allied victory does not depend on the amount of surviving
infantry.
If the German commander hot-foots it to the radar station, he will have
all the equipment he needs there to call in an air strike. He must,
however, report a large amount of armour in order to get his strike. If
he reports attacking infantry forces, which will be smaller than his own
forces, and perhaps scattered in the woods, he will get no air-strike. If
he reports a major column of armour, his superiors will send in the
ground-attack planes. These will arrive three initiatives later. If he
doesn't report the armour he'll get no air-strike, nor does he deserve one
- after all, if you were the superior of a commander who was stationed
right next to a radar site, and who didn't report an attacking column of
armour to the Luftwaffe, would you promote the idiot? Any fool knows a
radar site has a radio link to the air-force. You don't need to tell an
officer that.
This means that the allied commander has three initiatives to get his
tanks through the gap. Any tanks not through the gap, including tanks not
yet on table, will be hit by strong air-attacks. You could either play
this out, using die rolls to see how many tanks blow up, or else just say
that all tanks still in the open, to the right of the dotted line, retreat
off board, and the operation is a failure for the allies. Tanks in forest
cannot be attacked from the air, and those left of the dotted line need a
roll of 5+ to be seen and attacked, so some tanks might just get away with
it, but remember that they are now in dense terrain against out-numbering
infantry with lots of HEAT weapons.
For extra confusion, you might introduce one Allied officer and one stand
of allied paratroopers, part-way into the game, arriving on the edge of
area 1. These are lost and don't know what's going on. They are too few
to do much damage by shooting, but might just accidentally draw off a
significant number of Germans.
Excessive use of smoke by the allies might spoil the scenario. In
Crossfire, smoke is very predictable, and very good. The allies should
not have vast amounts of smoke available. You could rule that it is
windy over the open ground , and that accordingly smoke sometimes blows
off course in that part of the table. After a player rolls succesfully
(3-6) for a smoke mission in his phasing initiative to land in the open
swathe, roll again. On a 1-3, place the smoke 2d6" further towards the
bottom of the map than intended. When the initiative ends, roll again
for wind effects, and apply the result immediately.
If there is no umpire, then the guy who knows the scenario should be the
allied attacker. He will have rehearsed his attack, and have foreseen the
dangers. In this case, one might add a load of dug-in MMG nests around
the radar station, for game balance, and perhaps some camouflaged FO
station which can see the line of AT obstacles (which Jerry may deploy
hidden), with land line to a couple of 81mm mortars.
A swathe of mostly open ground crosses the board where the AT obstacles
are. There may be some undulation in the ground, but no cover for
attacking troops. There is cover at the end edge of the board, where the attackers arrive(2).
The area of the board left of the dotted line includes quite a lot of
woods and similar cover which would make spotting from the air very
difficult.