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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 03

Dateline 3127.110-104

General Buck’s advanced HQ on West Continent, Cydonia

The Martians have landed! They made a major landing with most of a GF division just outside OLYMPUS. My shuttle landing reinforcements for OLYMPUS diverted to ENSEMBLE as the nearest friendly location. A major assault on OLYMPUS took place with indiscriminate bombardment by the Martians, resulting in 4,000 civilian casualties, as well as wiping out my sea marine force (no reported survivors).

A third sea marine force successfully assaulted KUTCHI and displaced the enemy logistics base there. They took some casualties on the way in and two transport flyers were damaged also (but repairable).

Finnish Defence Forces Annual report 2002, p. 7
Image via Wikipedia

On the North coast the enemy armoured division trapped south of DEANVILLE has been all but destroyed. The infantry component has dispersed into the woods and is no longer a fighting force. The tank brigade has been reduced to a combat ineffective cadre. My two tank brigades are at about 50% strength but I have been allocated four more RMP, so have enough to re-build them.

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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 02

Dateline 3127.105-109

General Buck’s advanced HQ on West Continent, Cydonia

Operation VALKYRIE has been a major success! A successful seaborne assault by 3rd Tank Brigade has taken DEANVILLE cutting off the line of retreat of an enemy armoured division (although at a cost of 3,000 civilian casualties and ejecting an enemy infantry brigade West along the coast).

A simultaneous assault by the 1st & 2nd Tank Brigades from the front line to the North has reduced the enemy Division to less than half strength and prevented its escape.

Additionally an Airborne assault has taken place landing a sea marine force in both OLYMPUS and ENSEMBLE, threatening the enemy Air Logistics Base to the South of OLYMPUS.

The news is greeted with delight back home, and I have been awarded a medal. I also have four more RMP and reinforcements in the shape of an Infantry Brigade and the temporary loan of two shuttles to land them in OLYMPUS as soon as it can be arranged.

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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 01

Invasion from Mars is one of Megagame Makers megagames, designed by Jim Wallman and played in Anerley Town Hall in south London. The Invasion from Mars website has the game rules and the map as well as some background info on the downloads page.

I played the part of General Stanley Buck, a loyal and competent commander of the Democratic Republic of Cydonia’s Army Group West (AGW) (in reality about Corps strength, three two brigade armoured divisions plus air and sea components with appropriate logistics support). (details of some typical units)

At the game start AGW is already committed and has captured the Eastern end of the West Continent (link to map). This gives a firm jumping off point for the next phase of the offensive and the military balance shows that AGW slightly outnumbers the New Cydonia Colony (NCC) forces.

In my pre-game thinking I had decided to try an air and sea outflanking move, perhaps directed at the enemy Capital AGRIPPA (see map). One of the things that was clear though, was that the sea logistics base needed to be moved closer to the front to support operations beyond the current front line, it being at the maximum extent of the range from the current location.

Invasion from Mars

[3127.100 – 3127.104]

Operations in this period were intended to probe forwards while the logistics assets were moved forwards. Additionally some of the damaged units (two combat flyers and a tank brigade) were repaired using the available four RMP (Repair & Maintenance Points). The Operation on the Northern coast was called off as my tank brigade was outmatched by the armoured division it faced (a tank brigade, an infantry brigade and air support).

Original caption: CLOSE SUPPORT-- This is one ...
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However the deployment of the enemy was clear and it appeared that the majority of forces were in the front line to defend against further advances. There was an infantry brigade in the Capital, another with the air logistics base and a third moving on the North coast towards DEANVILLE. The cities of OLYMPUS, ENSEMBLE and ALI were empty.

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Another side of the COIN

I ran my game of being an Afghan farmer “The Other Side of the COIN” at the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group’s (CLWG) annual conference yesterday afternoon. This was its second outing, you can see my onside report from the first run here.

Since the last outing the game has developed further to address some of the comments that the players made then. In particular I had a set of individual objective cards to drive some behaviours and give the players something to focus on that was essentially different each time the game gets played (and also makes the farmers all slightly different from each other, there is a danger that they all do the same thing). The other advantage of the cards is that it stops a purely economic rationality setting in immediately and just converting to grow poppy (because the income levels from this are a couple of orders of magnitude higher that any other sort of crops – the real reason that the Afghans grow so much opium).

Another development was the introduction of a set of cards to represent improvements or capabilities that the farmers can invest in. for example, securing a fuel supply, or building schools etc. These were supposed to form a pyramid of improvement, in that each of the items was allocated a level, and to buy a level 2 improvement then you need to support that with two level 1 improvements. Some of the improvements had pre-requisites, but apart from that it was simply building your pyramid that counted. Each improvement had some icons on the bottom that told you what sort of improvement it was, whether it benefited the whole community or just an individual. It also told you whether or not it promoted the Islamic lifestyle and/or used fuel. The individual briefings, and the farming mechanics, remained completely unchanged from the previous run of the game. I also didn’t get an opportunity to properly document some of the changes.

The improvements were all documented on the cards I produced, and there was a price list to make it easier to know what was available. In this run of the game the valley was a lot more peaceful. We played through two years of farming and in that time two of the four played farmers decided to grow opium, one on a small scale (a couple of fields) and the other as his major crop. In addition there was a bumper crop on the first summer.  This injected quite a lot of money into the game, and so resulted in some significant improvements in the town, a new well and a Madrassa were established as well as regular fuel & medical supplies and a specialist seed supply.  A shortage of time and players meant that there wasn’t any external tension to make different decisions about things, and the local cleric focussed on good works (establishing the water supply and madrassa from the funds raised).

Lessons learnt from this session:

  • the amount of money needs some careful calculation and appropriate denomination notes produced to make it easy to count out the correct sums;
  • the farming mechanisms need to be significantly streamlined to make them work faster, and the task allocation piece removed (or at least built into other mechanisms unobtrusively) as it wasn’t a real constraint on activity;
  • I need longer than two hours to run the game, at least double that, and I also need more players, at least seven, with clearer briefing for the police and the taliban as well as an external agent to foment trouble (or be the catalyst for it);
  • the mechanisms need to be properly collected into a well signposted reference document, ideally quite short. There also needs to be a revision of the play aid for farmers to put all the key mechanics on it.
  • I need a mechanism (or at least a trigger) for involving external authority in the area should there be a widespread growth of poppy. So some research on the eradication programmes and their timings would be useful.

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What you missed at CLWG in September 2011

Three interesting games and a load of cake! We started with Peter Merritt’s 1814 political game which looked at how Napoleon’s Marshals dealt with the oncoming defeat of France and the transfer of power. Following that Andrew Hadley brought out his game about the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We then finished with Rob Cooper’s game about the seizure of the Mecca Grand Mosque in 1979, complete with head-dress.

1814 and all that

Peter put on this game to try out some ideas about how you could run a game about the decline of the French First Empire. The players were mostly Napoleon’s Marshals (although Jim Wallman was Napoleon). There was an interesting mechanic of collecting cards to show which of the likely candidates for ruler of France you could evidence support for (five in total, including Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Bernadotte, Napoleon’s son and A.N.Other-Bourbon). The decisions per turn were relatively simple, and the operational game was quite abstract, so no real need to pay attention to it as a Marshal.

We had a good post-game discussion for this, helped by Jim’s notes which he’d made as Napoleon was under-worked. I’m not familiar with the actual politics of the period, so will confine comments to some of the mechanical aspects rather than the rest of it. There could be an interesting game to be had with the Marshals deciding to attribute their actions to either military or political activities (with enough actions per turn to be able to do a little of both when required). Without a played Napoleon the Marshals have to work collaboratively initially to keep France in the war long enough for them to build some support for a likely new ruler. They also need to try and choose (as a small faction) how to prosecute the war in a way that will bring their chosen favourite to the top of the list for the allies.

One of the ways to modify the current game to support this would be to explicitly get the Marshals to club together in the Paris crisis phase to work collaboratively to deal with the crises, perhaps using a hidden card in the pool way to resolve it, like the Battlestar Galactica board game. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to play BSG each crisis has a value and a suit (colours in BSG) that are needed to resolve it. Cards that don’t help add to the difficulty of resolution (allowing players to secretly sabotage things). This would allow them to either club together to resolve things while they want to prolong the game, or to swiftly end things when the time has come for Napoleon’s end.

Added to this there could be some stacked decks with support for each of the candidates, allowing players to take cards to suit their chosen candidates. It would also support attempts to get rid of support for other cards and having a broad range of cards for dealing with crises but at the players choice rather than being dealt completely randomly.

On the operational side, I broadly agreed that the map could be further simplified from a point to point system to a track for each of the main armies, although possibly with some cross over points to allow forces to be shuffled from track to track. The mechanisms could be relatively simple, some sort of stacking limit for the allies, units move one spot at a time (or even the die roll mechanism allowing 0,1,2 spaces according to weather, command allocation etc). Any track with Napoleon in it would remain static (assuming Napoleon is supported by troops and the odds aren’t too great against the French) but with the cost to the Marshals that Napoleon in the field makes it harder to keep control of Paris. Some simple battle rules to show whether or not contested advances happen would also be useful, and then one or two French Marshals could probably handle the whole thing on their own (although others may be required to allow sufficient military actions to happen).

Lastly the end game piece probably needs some thinking about, and perhaps a way to be influenced by the players.

Athenian Invasion of Sicily

I didn’t quite catch the proper name of this game. Andrew Hadley continued his series of ancient Mediterranean themes games with this one about the Athenians invading Sicily around 415 BC during the Peloponnesian war in the late 5th Century BC (431-404 BC). We were randomly dealt some key characters from the Athenian assembly and given a few pages of background telling us what happened, key arguments for and against the invasion and some intelligence of the cities on Sicily and nearby (allegiance, attitude to Syracuse, military forces etc). We then engaged in a debate to agree a plan, commit force levels and appoint command.

Once we’d sorted that out we began a campaign, although time pressure (and having a third game to play) meant that we had to wrap up relatively early into the execution of the plan. There were some interesting aspects to this, but in a lightly implemented way. There were pre-printed cards with a variety of words (one per card, e.g. Treachery) which could be used to get a +1 to a relevant die roll. Only one of these could be used per turn unless the action was planned, committing you to it regardless of other events. There were also some personal bonuses, e.g. +2 military for generals. Each situation was assigned a difficulty score by Andy to be beaten on a d12 plus any bonuses. For our small game this didn’t present any problems, but in a larger game there would need to be more guidance on probabilities and scores etc to ensure consistency and players being able to resolve some of it themselves.

Certainly this was a fairly workable and enjoyable game that needs a longer time slot to do it justice.

Seizure of the Grand Mosque (1979)

Our third and last game was a kriegspieled scenario run by Rob Cooper about the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 (on the first day of AH 1400) by some Islamic dissidents claiming to be the followers of the Mahdi.

In the scenario we were all playing either members of the Saudi royal family (and by extension the Government) or, in Jim Wallman’s case, the senior cleric on the Ulema and spiritual adviser to the King. Daniel was King Fahd, Richard Hands as the Crown Prince, Peter Merritt as the second in line, Dave Boundy as the Minister of the Interior, Andrew Hadley in command of the Saudi Arabia National Guard (SANG) and myself as the Defence Minister. Giles also arrived about now, but decided to observe rather than participate.   To add flavour and get us all into the appropriate spirit for our characters Rob had brought along some headgear, you can see the pictures that Daniel took on facebook. We also had to stop every now and then for prayers, underlining our devotion.

There is a good account of the historical events on wikipedia, and I’m not going to repeat that. However the scenario opens with a group of Islamic dissidents (variously numbered from 30-40 up to about 500) seizing control of the Grand Mosque during prayers, locking the gates and shooting some policemen. At the time there were somewhere in the region of 50,000 pilgrims inside the complex, which is vast, several hundred metres across in each direction.

The Saudis have two initial problems, the first is that they don’t have appropriate resources close enough to respond immediately, it takes time to assemble a response force. The second problem is that violence is not allowed in the Grand Mosque, and also the Ulema (the religious council) are unsure whether or not the chap claiming to be the Mahdi is an apostate, or the real thing.

So there was a soft start to the game, during which I ordered up all my airborne special forces and also a company of tanks and some APCs just in case. Although the latter would take some days to arrive.

The first response was from the police, being locals. All they could do was herd the fleeing pilgrims away from the Grand Mosque. Any time that they went close they got shot at from the minarets. Shortly afterwards some of the local SANG turned up and tried unsuccessfully to approach the Grand Mosque. About six hours in a company of my Airborne turned up and set up Observation Posts all round the Grand Mosque to see where the terrorists were positioned. We also tried to get some helicopter recce done, but the terrorists used a .50 cal on the helos, so they quite reasonably gave that up as a bad job.

A family conference call took place while all this was getting under way. There was a unanimous agreement to censor all media and cut off all communications with Mecca other than official government lines. We also refused to even acknowledge to the outside world that there were any problems.

Also after some deliberations the Ulema decided that we could use force to eject the terrorists from the Grand Mosque, although we had to be careful not to damage the Grand Mosque and also to avoid harming any of the pilgrims inside. Certainly attacking the minarets to take out the snipers was off the table.

By the following day we had a few hundred police, a similar number of SANG and just over a Battalion of Airborne forces. So I decided to make an attempt on the long gallery which was a panhandle to the main part of the Grand Mosque complex. This meant that there was some cover from fire on the approach to it from the street on the outside as it was in dead ground from the minarets. Waiting until dark we brought each of the minarets under small arms fire while two companies of Airborne forces made their way into the Grand Mosque. Initially things went well, an entry was effected using explosives and both companies passed inside, when radio comms were lost because of the thickness of the walls. Follow on SANG and police were then met by the survivors of an ambush retreating back out of the complex. Apparently the supposed ‘Mahdi’ had ambushed them, he had been seen to be immune to small arms fire, escaping being hit under intense fire, and also had been picking up grenades and throwing them back.

By now we were coming under pressure to get the Grand Mosque cleared in time for Friday prayers (it was Wednesday night that the first assault went in). The Ulema decided, after much more deliberation, that while the Grand Mosque was inviolate, this only really applied to the original area and not the entire complex. So the only area we couldn’t use violence in was the central courtyard.

Early on Thursday morning another Airborne Battalion arrived, as did two companies of APC mounted infantry. The tanks were en route on transporters and were due for early afternoon on the Thursday. SANG and the Police also had their commandos in Mecca as well. The gloves were off, which the family council reluctantly agreed. My Airborne support companies used TOW missiles on the minarets and each of the three doors. Not waiting for the tanks to be ready, we put APCs through each of the main gates and followed through into the complex en masse. This co-ordinated response seemed to work and we rapidly gained control of the complex, although it was clear after an hour or two that we didn’t have the number of prisoners (or bodies) that we had expected, and that some of the notable personages were missing.

It transpired that they were in the undercroft, which fortunately was on a suitably massive scale that we could use the APCs to break through the barricades to get into. At this stage time stood against us and Rob hand-waved the second stage of the game to get us to a wash-up where he told us how we’d done compared to real life. Surprisingly to us it turned out that my ‘gloves off’ approach had been far more restrained than had happened historically!

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Ars Magica – Lumen

Recently Lumen has been on a trip to Waddenzee with several of her friends from the covenant at Triamore. (See myweb.tiscali.co.uk/thelemur/ars/ars%20wus/1224b_april_wu.html for the write up).

From her perspective the journey was mostly uneventful apart from:

  • premonitions of the attack on the ship they were using (during which she mostly made attackers fall asleep);
  • some searching on a swamp near Waddenzee where she realised that she could spontaneously cast to power the punt they were using; she also made a bird;
  • the visit to Waddenzee itself, where she rescued one of the local women from ill use, employing her as a second maid;
  • a night excursion just on the mainland on return where a lot of time was spent searching in the dark for a particularly unpleasant creature, which was later found to be called a Lamia.

So what does Lumen take from all that experience? Before she went off she had a desire to learn to read Greek, she also had some fondness for getting out and meeting people between her winter study sessions. So she has spent the journey up getting to know something of the places she has been. A little of that will also have been reflection on her Parma as she was going to visit a covenant that may have been unfriendly. She also spent a three encounters searching for things (two of those in the dark) and she spontaneously cast at least three spells. On the way back she spent some significant time trying to communicate with her new maid, so some language skills there. She also used her second sight.

So her autumn/winter study priorities are likely to be:

  • learn to read greek;
  • read some sort of bestiary to find out more about lamia (and similar sorts of creatures);
  • read up on parma magica, ignem and terram (in that order)
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Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

"In the West (Western campaign).- Panzer ...
“In the West (Western campaign) – Panzer II and Panzer I in the woods; KBK Lw Kompanie Luftwaffe, “Luftwaffe war-reporting company 4” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the WestThe Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West by Karl-Heinz Frieser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As part of the planning for the megagame War in the West I bought myself a copy of Blitzkrieg Legend because it is the German Army’s official history (although it didn’t get written until the 1990s).

Blitzkrieg Legend Review

From reading the first couple of chapters and looking through the maps you can see the evolution of the German plan. You can see why the directive was written the way that it was in October 1939.

The most interesting thing for me is that there is no concept of a lightning war, the general staffs & high command all believe that the start of the world war was a gross mistake and spells certain doom for Germany as being too soon to be winnable. the strong belief is that the strength of the economy is what wins wars, not surprise attacks (and for my money they were right).

After the planning phase there is a fairly detailed examination of the attacks themselves. What becomes clear is how lucky the Germans were, although some of this is down to the way that the 100,000 man army has trained its troops, and this training continues into the expanded army. It is human factors rather than technology that makes the blitzkreig work. The Germans were exceedingly lucky, when they infiltrate forward and put small parties over rivers and obstacle the enemy retires rather than counter-attacks.

I would certainly recommend this book strongly to anyone who has an interest in WW2, and particularly the Fall of France in 1940.

View all my reviews

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Inspiration – Glencoe & Dinosaurs

Map in English of Scotland This is a lighter r...

Image via Wikipedia

Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc.

Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice.

Glencoe

The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel ‘Yesterday’ about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I’ve done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret treaties were agreed, one for each of the Kings! It struck me that there was huge potential for one of CLWG’s traditional double dealing and money making deals in this. So much so that I went and checked my bookshelf to see if I had any books on the subject, but it was a bit thin. So I ordered the John Prebble book on the subject Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre from Amazon.

Dinosaurs

20140624_103621I was going to offer that as a session at the CLWG Christmas meeting until I got my second sleet of inspiration later on. After dinner Alexander decided that he wanted to watch a movie about dinosaurs, so we got to watching Jurassic Park III. This set the brain cells firing again, and I got to wondering what the Government reaction would most likely be to the news of the first Jurassic Park. The game idea is that I will brief one player to be the CEO of a corporation that has built the dinosaur safari park on an island offshore. The other players will be the various Government Ministers and officials. Depending on their reaction we might re-role and widen to take up other national government roles, and perhaps even military roles. Anyway no doubt I will do a little more on this as I get on with writing it up as a game.

Preparing For War – Onside Report

British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk
Image via Wikipedia

Rather than run a conversational design session at the November meeting I decided to try and do something that was at least vaguely playable. My reasoning was that I’d been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could actually have been played, and I’d felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real.

Anyway, I did a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me) and so I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I’d decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map of Devon/Dorset was the first to hand when I was collecting materials for the game, they might equally have ended up in Scotland! John’s character, 2/Lt Robson was a recently commissioned officer who had been sent to France within days of being commissioned and then evacuated a few weeks later.

On arrival in the village by train 2/Lt Robson discovered that he wasn’t expected, and nor was his company! He set about contacting the local policeman, the vicar, chair of the parish council and other notables in the village.

Staying overnight in the village pub he established that the company could be billeted on the Mill when it arrived. Within a day the remainder of the company arrived by train under command of the Major (Jim Wallman). Shortly afterwards Lt Hanse (Mukul) and 2/Lt Duff (Dave Boundy) reported for duty. The company was swiftly sorted out into platoons and sections, on the basis of sharing out the experienced men and the good NCOs as well as those with dodgier records.

The first few weeks were played out in organising the company, the accommodation, acquiring weapons, worrying about area of operations, responsibility for guarding bridges etc and also getting everyone to do lots of drill. Having worked all this out and got to the beginning of September I moved to monthly turns where the OC set the training priority and each month I asked for volunteers for Officer training (and later on Commandos) as well as setting some small incident for resolution, e.g. scrounging a coal lorry, or the Christmas do. If I was going to run this game properly I’d do some more research on some of these things and ensure that the players had some better background. As it was I was making it all up as I went along, including the mechanisms, so it was in areas no doubt thinner than it ought to have been, and probably quite ahistorical.

On the whole we managed to pass four and a half hours playing the game before I drew it to a halt so that we could have some discussion. For me the main point is that there is a game in all of this as there are many decisions to be made. Largely it is a building/development game in its purest sense, although what you are building/developing in this case are your soldiers. Probably the best way to improve the game would be to make a small card for each soldier which could be updatable with their stats, rank etc. That would simplify record keeping as the platoon commanders can just keep those in front of them organised into sections etc. The platoon commanders could also have a mechanism for developing people which would give them some decisions about how to improve their platoon, and also about how to interpret the OC’s training priorities.

We had some discussion at the end about leadership styles and now these should affect the development of a platoon/company. This certainly needs further thought, and I think it could be a good way to develop things, but I’m not sure exactly how it ought to impact on the game mechanisms.

If I do get further thoughts from people then I will do something on this.

One thing I am conscious of was not having a well thought out mechanism for exercises, partly this was because I didn’t think we had enough time to break into a proper wargame. My inclination would be to play this sort of game as a campaign, and play each exercise as a largely kriegspieled wargame using the figure resolution of the combat mechanisms (which I did prepare, but didn’t use and I think I’ll need to re-do in the light of the outcome of the session).

On another point, we semi-randomly picked 6th Battalion DLI to be the battalion that we were part of. A quick look at google afterwards showed that 6 DLI were a territorial battalion and went to France with 50th Northumbrian Divison in early 1940 and then were evacuated through Dunkirk, they went to North Africa in April 1941 (when we finished our game) and then fought through the rest of the North Africa campaign, Sicily & Italy. They came back to the UK at the end of 1943 and were in the assault troops on Gold Beach on 6th June 1944. Probably one of the few battalions to have been at the sharp end all the way through the war.

Here is the spreadsheet (Open Document Format) that I used to speed things up during play (although this will be printed onto cards before I next try this game). Company Roster.ods

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Battle of the Hills, 21 January 1943

Seaforth Highlanders
Image via Wikipedia

This is a short article about the advance of the 51st Highland Division in Tunisia in the follow up from El Alamein. I wrote this to be played as a tabletop wargame using Command Decision.

Ground
The coast road between Homs & Corradini in Tunisia. On the right (from the perspective of the British advance) is the sea. The coast road lies a few miles inland at places. There is a steep coastal ridge on the left flank of the battle area with desert to the south. Within all this there are a large number of steep sided, but small, wadis running from the hills to the sea. There are also one or two significant hills that sit astride or on the road.

To quote Captain J.A.F. Watt (OC B Company 5th Seaforths). “At the Assembly Area we met the CO. We were to attack two sharp conical hills we could see faintly outlined against the sky two or three thousand yards away. One of them was farther away than the other and to the left as we looked at them.”

“From what we could make of the maps and what little we could see of the country, it seemed as though the road ran past the right of our objectives. This assumption proved to be wrong. The road in fact curved sharply to the left across the line of our advance, then right again between the hills.” On the right flank a deep wadi blocked the advance of A Company.

Situation
Elements of the German 90th Light Division are dug in forward of two conical hills on either side of the main road 3 miles short of Corradini. Broken ground & wadis lie to their front.

The previous evening 51st Highland Division had been delayed at another hill with a fort atop it (named Edinburgh Castle) on the road between Homs & Corradini. The initial attack failed but an outflanking movement caused the Germans to withdraw well before dark. The initial failure had earned the Divisional Commander a ‘rocket’ from Montgomery and therefore inspired him to issue orders to his subordinates to speed up the rate of advance.

The British are in two main groups. One group (154 Brigade) is marching on foot along the coast to outflank the enemy near Corradini. The second group (spearheaded by Hammerforce) is moving up the main road from Homs to Corradini.

Hammerforce
Commanded by Brigadier Richards (23rd Armoured Brigade).
A Company, 2 Seaforths
A Company, 1/7 Middlesex (MG)
Tank Squadron, 40 RTR
2 Troops, 61 AT Regiment
25lber Battery

5 Seaforths with 40 RTR (Valentines) make assault from 3000 yards (60″). 1 bty 25-pdrs in direct support. The tanks have serious problems moving from the start line because of the terrain.

154 Brigade
Commander – Brigadier Stirling
7th Bn Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders
2nd Bn Seaforth Highlanders
7th Bn Black Watch
Tank Squadron, 40 RTR
25lber Battery, 126 Field Regiment RA

90th Light Division
A mixed battlegroup. No detailed information available, although the British histories report the following, which suggests depleted Regimental strength:

– Germans have MGs & mortars.
– 3 MGs dug in on one hill (Weapons Stand)
– counter attack by infantry & half-track (only 1 – so no model)
– retreat in captured British vehicles with several AT guns and a tank
– heavy 210mm guns
– many 88 mm AT guns (2 stands)
– 12 dual-purpose 20mm guns (3 stands)
– many mortars
– 260 prisoners & 10 guns captured