A good while ago I managed to pick up a Cigar Box Battle river mat on eBay. I had long been thinking about the interesting challenges of a game with one side having to make a strategic withdrawal across a river and the other trying to seize the crossings. Finding the mat advanced my plans for that game. Unfortunately the pandemic got in the way and with all my projects the timeline extended well beyond the original plan.
But after picking up not just one but two bridges from Sarissa Precision things got under way. I had chose a road and a rail bridge, so I obviously needed to build the track to go with the former and decided a station would also be a good addition. I also wanted to make the game big both physically (a 12 foot by 6 foot table) but also from a Chain of Command perspective; this meant at least a company a side. Fortunately I had collected sufficient 28mm figures to make that work.
So I finally put the game on at the club.
It saw a rag tag French outfit as the defender facing a determined German company supported by a platoon of tanks. The French were made up of a platoon of Foreign Legion and a platoon of Tirailleurs Sénégalais on one side of the river, needing to withdraw across the bridges and a Motorcycle platoon holding those bridges. The French also had some support in the form of an anti-tank gun and some engineers in a truck - the latter to demolish the bridges before the Germans could capture them intact. Along with two Bouteilles Incendiaires, two roadblocks and a couple of full Chain of Command dice for the withdrawing troops, this was the defending force. The Germans, in addition to their infantry company and tank platoon, had an Adjutant, a Pioneer team in a Kubelwagen, a SdKfz 222 armoured car, an infantry gun and a truck with four rubber boats. It wouldn’t have been an early war game without a Shabby Nazi Trick - the German players selected a fifth column sniper (Jean-Claude).
We played through the patrol phase which saw some interesting jockeying for positions around the buildings on the German side of the board. With jump off points then positioned we were ready for the meat of the game.
The Foreign Legion were covering the French left flank and the Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the right. The Germans began their advance with the platoon on their right flank making serious progress until they encountered the Legion. The other German platoons soon found that the Tirailleurs weren’t going to be easily dislodged and put them under heavy concentrated fire. The roadblock constrained the easiest route for their Panzers and so the main armoured advance was through the farmland to the right of the road.
Repeated exchanges of fire were telling on the French forces as they tried to hold the Germans long enough for their engineers to deploy and mine the bridges.
Eventually they began to fall back but not before taking serious casualties. Meanwhile Jean-Claude who had been placed in the church tower (it’s traditional!) was causing the French some unexpected problems.
With the French C-in-C desperate to blow the now mined bridges he ordered a full withdrawal but this was easier said than done with the Germans covering most of the routes to the bridges.
The
Tirailleurs were aiming for the road bridge but when they got there the C-in-C ordered them to switch to the distant rail bridge so he could blow the former.
Meanwhile the German pioneers were making heavy weather of destroying the roadblock and the motorised elements of the German force were still held up as a result.
In the end only a single Legion section got to safety before the second bridge was blown and with neither side having been able to meet their victory conditions I declared the game a draw.
