NOT A GOOD DAY FOR NATO

Here are photos of a game we played last Sunday. The scenario was set in Germany in 1985 and based on a scene from the book Team Yankee. Essentially it had Team Yankee and a battalion of British infantry pitted against a Warsaw Pact assault on their positions. The game was played with 1/72 scale models using an modified set of Rapid Fire rules.

The game was played in two phases. The opening phase was a Warsaw Pact (WP) airborne assault on two bridges which were defended by a British infantry battalion. The WP airborne came in aboard two waves of helicopters, supported by a Hind gunship.

 

The first wave of WP airborne arrive.

WP airborne land outside a factory held by British infantry. Earlier that turn the Hind had worked over the factory with its chain gun and knocked out half the British infantry there.The British then rolled a morale test and failed. 

The Hind swoops in to deal with the British mortar group which had fired on the WP airborne. Half the mortar group was knocked out by the Hind and when the remainder of the unit tested its morale it failed. This repeated failure of NATO morale was going to become major feature of the game.

The second wave of WP airborne sweep in. They shot up a hill top they had chosen to capture and when the British troops there tested their morale they failed again! Something was seriously amiss in that British battalion for sure. The WP airborne then easily captured the hill. 

 

The final straw came when the Brits moved up two Scorpions in the hope of doing some damage to the newly landed WP airborne. The Hind swooped in and knocked out one of the Scorpions and when the other Scorpion tested its morale it failed, its crew then bailed out and quickly departed the scene. This was all too much for what remained of the British battalion and it tested its morale and surprise, surprise it failed and surrendered. Serious questions will no doubt be asked just who that British battalion was and why it performed so consistently appallingly throughout the engagement. Rolling endless 1s whenever a British morale test was called for certainly did not help it.

The second phase of the game involved the arrival of a WP armored column and the table was lengthened to accommodate the new arrivals.

The WP Tank and motorized infantry column arrives and advances over the captured bridges. 

 

Team Yankee awaits the onslaught.

A US infantry battalion shelters in cover.

WP armor begins to deploy as it exits the town

The tanks engage. No matter what the US tankers did they could not hit a thing while the WP armor never missed a shot. The dice had definitely decided they were communist dice for this game. 

 

The battle turns into a massacre of NATO armor. All the US MBTs were knocked out and half the US infantry APCs were knocked out by a WP airstrike. Not one WP AFV was damaged. NATO air tried to intervene but was shot out of the sky by WP AAA. To do this the WP players needed to roll a 9 on a d10 and guess what, they rolled a 9. It absolutely was not NATOs day.