The Hinge of Fate:
A 1943 Campaign Scenario Replay

Allies: Jack Beckman; then Paul Abrahamse & Allen Gies
Axis: Alan Emrich

Played on Saturday, 19 June 1999 at the home of Alan Emrich

JB:  Alan told me that this scenario was designed to see if the Wallies could open the second front in France in '43, so I gave it a try.  I came ashore at Caen and Cherbourg (Caen was undefended, Cherbourg had a German infantry corps with no German HQ support). I also used the Surprise Attack Option card, so I was able to advance the BEF HQ across the channel with the attack. To the right you'll see the aftermath of the initial landing in France from my vantage point at the table. Note that I used two Beachheads to make sure I got the job done. It wasn't pretty using two beachheads, but I didn't want Alan to reinforce France during his May-June '43 turn so I had to keep my forces a bit disheveled in England during setup to avoid suspicion. This little ruse worked and Alan reinforced Italy, as I'd hoped.

In spite of a major counter attack by the Axis, I was able to stay ashore and build up for an Overlord in '44 already on the continent. I kept the two armies and the HQ at Tunis for most of the summer as a threat to Italy so he couldn't strip it off too quickly.

In the East, I also used the Surprise Attack Option card, which gave me a nice extra shift.

AE: Allow me to narrate the story from here. The Summer of '43 was brutal. I began my Axis Player Turn by sizing up the situation in Italy and making it as strong as I could as quickly as I could. Within a couple of turns, it looked like the Wallies would have a rough time of it if they dare landed. I got the German-Italian Panzer Army and the Med HQ built up within two turns and ready for action. I really wanted to keep the Italians from collapsing, so even after I saw the big Wallied landings in Normandy, I kept Italy pretty well guarded in the face of enemy forces in Tunisia. Jack kept tossing support units in the Western Med, and I kept contesting. That was my priority, protect Italy and not let him get any multi-step units across. This worked out well for a long time, as Italian forces would later go on duty garrisoning much of France while the Germans did the fighting there. The down side to keeping the Mediterranean contested, however, was to have my forces in the East brutally victimized by the Red Air Force (as you'll soon see).

So, instead of nailing Italy, Jack whacked me pretty well in France with an early D-Day backed up by his Surprise Attack card. His setup in England didn't look like much, but he sure made the most out of it.

Fortunately, I had a useful hodge podge of Axis units mucking around, including an HQ I'd built up there in May-June '43 (but his landing was just out of my HQ range). With a panzer step, an HQ, and a Blitz card up, I did a Rommel and threw what I had at his landing. My ace-in-the-hole was that he'd pushed the US 7th army forward but only had a British HQ to back it up. I leapt on every Yank I could find for two Combat Segments and when I'd finished I had his US army surrounded and down a step. Oh, man, the Americans were circling the wagons in France, boys, let me tell you. Jack was pretty demoralized with my counterattack and, I admit, I was feeling pretty good. After all, I'd put his "big push" on the ropes and felt I could push him back into the sea.

In the Soviet Union, I dinked around a little bit near Kursk and made a major push on Murmansk (landing the 1st SS panzer corps in Oulu, Finland, to help with the push up there). While the northern campaign would lead to a successful conclusion and the capture of Murmansk by summer's end (at the cost of the SS panzer corps), matters in the center were not so good.

Sure, my initial pressure put some unequal losses on the Soviets, but they answered back with a huge Offensive card plus their Surprise Attack. (Ouch!). Well, at least both of the Allied Surprise Attack cards were used up, so I didn't have to worry about seeing any more of those for the rest of the game. After the Soviet's initial attacks, the center of my line in the Russia looked as pictured. The thinning of the German Army had well and truly begun. The attrition was murder on the Russian Front because I had prioritized the West for my Support units. The combination of a Soviet Blitz, with Red Air Support, Red HQs, and a Surprise Attack Shift was lethal. I never recovered and got any sort of initiative back in the East. Only the odd stabilizing attack against an over-eager advancing Soviet units (invariably tank forces) was the best I could muster. Fortunately, a shift in my Air Support unit contesting strategy (aided greatly by atrocious luck on the Soviet's part), and a little skill on my part, was all I would need to keep the Red Army at bay for the rest of the game.

What Surprised me more than Jack's sudden landing in Normandy was his recovery from my rather brilliant counterattack. Just when it all looked hopeless (according to The Times), the the British 1st army in England rallied to the rescue, conducted its own cross-channel invasion and, sure enough managed to get the survivors of the US7th army extracted and safely back in Reimes. (Ironically, we had the movie A Bridge Too Far playing in the background, and they were at the scene where the British General is standing in front of the huge map explaining that advance by 30th Corps would be like the cavalry riding to the rescue of the besieged Allied forces surrounded and in great peril -- which is exactly what Jack pulled off!) This "rescue invasion" saw the US 7th Army end the turn stacked with the Canadian corps and, therefore, under the watchful guns of the BEF HQ that he kept hiding in Cherbourg. Jack even managed to snag Brest. Darn!

This out-of-nowhere attack cost me my panzer step and burned up my HQ unit, so any thought of further attacking in France this summer was out of the question. I was bleeding profusely in Russia and stubbornly refused to weaken Italy since he still had plenty of good forces in Tunisia. At this point, I had to accept that, although I'd cost him, Jack was in France to stay, and with Brest, his build-up would be rapid. I had to contain him as best I could, particularly this summer. I had no intention of letting him spend the Winter of '43/'44 dining in Paris!

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.S.R., Jack was making his major summer push in the region between Leningrad and Moscow. It was Destruction of Army Group Center time, starring Yours Truly as the destroyed. Even as I kept plugging the holes with German infantry corps, I knew something bad was in the offing. Sure enough, I'd left one poor infantry corps in an exposed position -- just ripe to be overrun, and that's exactly what Jack did. Ouch! Whose idea was that stupid overrun rule, anyway? <g>

Although Jack was bleeding tanks profusely (as the Soviets will with all their low-odds attacks and Regular Combat Segment follow ups to their armored Blitz breakthroughs), I was simply running out of boys to throw in the cauldron between Minsk and Moscow. Oh, things had gone swimmingly in the North, and the South was holding up very well, too -- but what did those matter if the Red Army was marching straight into the piggy bank of Axis Strategic Hexes in Germany? Ack! Scrape up the rollbahn units, boys, there's nothing between Ivan and our women but Hitler's empty promises of inevitable Soviet defeat...

My lines continued to deteriorate in Russia. I had to shift my Army Group North HQ to the center (I was lucky that Jack didn't really press his attacks against my HQ-less forces in the North more aggressively -- man I was sweating bullets over that one). Fortunately, I'd distracted a growing number of Soviet reinforcements to the Far North where he was building up a "retake Murmansk" campaign. Also, my Option card, Jet Fighters, was to yield fruit this Season. I scored both the Jet Fighter Interceptor and the Strategic Warfare Marker which I took as a War Production Marker (instead of Jet Fighter Production).

But what I needed was bodies. Some bodies! Any bodies! Help!! Since none were forthcoming, it was time to shorten up my line in Russia and start shifting some of my rested forces in the South to the harrowing ordeal that awaited them in the Center. All I could do was count my blessings that the Soviet Blitz had stopped and mud was coming.

Meanwhile, back in France, the Wallies continued to press during the clear weather of Summer to push along the western shores in an effort to extend my thinning line. The race was on as the Wallied forces grew very rapidly while I had to keep sending the lion's share of whatever I could scrape up to plug the holes on the Russian Front. Kos refers to the Russian Front replacement sinkhole as "feeding the bear" (the Soviet bear, in this case). You've got to live with this thing now, and either you feed the bear or the bear eats you.

Basically, for the Axis player in any of these late game situations, every turn that the Allies bash you, is followed on your next Player Turn by a sense of dread. How can you conjure up yet another defensive line? What miracle will it take this turn to plug the newest holes? How much ground can you give to keep your armies intact? Where should you stand, fight, and take it -- and for how long? I.e., when do you "hold 'em," and when do you "fold 'em?" It's a heck of a game challenge (and one I recommend to everyone -- you've got to try Totaler Krieg! as the Germans in one of these "Bunker Scenarios").

By August- September of 1943, the Wallies had admitted defeat in the Mediterranean. Their forces in the South were broken down into corps and marched back to Morocco (an overt threat to Spain, but they could be sailed to France with little difficulty). With this respite, I began to shift forces out of Italy and into France to fatten up my beleaguered forces there.

Three precious infantry steps from my Winter replacements went into Metz to form the B HQ unit in France. This unit had the dual task of stiffening my line and holding Paris. Another Wallied push along the coast, as pictured here, shows his Heavy Bombers intercepted by my Jet Fighter Interceptors. I got my Jet Fighters into play so quickly is because I rolled a '1' for its Delay and was laboring under a net zero Delay Die Roll Modifier. Tragically, when my Jet fighter Strategic Warfare Marker (which I chose to take as a War Production Marker) was rolled for on the next turn, I popped a '6,' sending it off into the distant future. That's the piece I really needed, and quick!

The Wallied advance in France, though, would be inexorable unless I could get another HQ in there around Vichy and shore up the lines. Notice the Italian units in the rear on garrison duty. This freed up many of the German infantry steps currently on the line. Notice, too, that the Wallied minor steps were being poured into the French war effort. I kept squashing his Partisans in Yugoslavia, so Jack figured that building up the French to do something useful was probably a better way to go.

When the fall mud was over in Russia and I could extricate my forces during the snow weather, I opted for a full skeedatle to a shorter, more defensible line. This meant a major pullout in the South and a shifting to the center of many of my forces from the southern withdrawal, including most of my panzer steps in the East.

Each turn of major pullback in the East brought me another turn of light casualties. For a while there, I was rolling for about eight multi-step units in the Delay Box every turn (between what they killed and what I had to break down to plug the holes). Talk about demoralizing! As you can see by this picture, I was steadily replacing my minor ally steps to throw into the Soviet Meat Grinder. Note that I have only one HQ on the entire Russian Front, a reduced one at that between Minsk and Smolensk. All I could see was visions of being rolled up like a carpet. Things were looking bad for the thin gray line, and only running away seemed to help. The news in the Berlin Gazette these days made for pretty grim reading.

Not that life was a bowl of cherries in France that winter, either. What you see here is a picture of the situation on the Western Front after my Spring '44 turn. Note the lengthening Axis lines and growing Wallied forces on The Continent. I needed steps, lots of them, and I could only find enough of them on the Führer Offensive card. To play that, one must first suffer the Axis Material Shortages card, which I revealed this turn.

Unfortunately, Jack, that dirty so-and-so <g>, revealed his Intensive Bombing card this Season. What that meant is that there was no US Commitment Level that turn. This put my Delay DRM at -2 for a Season, which was both a blessing and a curse. That because, while it was good to get my Support units and broken multi-step armies back quickly, I also quickly received my Material Shortages Marker, which I was in no hurry to get! Sure enough, during the mud, Material Shortages kicked in and the Bomb Plot went off. Hitler survived (the current +2 Political Die Roll Modifier thanks to no US Commitment Level seeing to that), but I did roll low enough for there to be an Axis Command/Supply Failure in the wake of the failed assassination attempt. Because it was a mud turn, though, the C/S Failure had no real effect.

Now, down in Morocco, the Wallied forces that never got to Italy were massing up around Gibraltar and, sure enough, the last turn of the Spring '44 Season saw a Wallied Declaration of war on Spain. It looked like another Axis egg was about to get scrambled and a Spanish omlette served up to General Eisenhower.

So, when the dreaded Summer of '44 began, here is what the situation looked like at the end of my May-June turn. I had "V" Weapons going and actually hoped for some Volkstrum results to put more bodies on the map. (My first roll, however, was Hitler Pressures Neutrals, which allowed me to remove the Neutrality Marker from Turkey that began the scenario there).

Jack was on the offensive on both fronts and even added his Wallied Uprising Supplement card to boot. The Russians, for their part, were set to retake Murmansk and storm my lines. In Russia, I had some strength in the Center now, but no terrain to cower in, while in the South I had terrain and no strength. The situation was not good. All I was able to send Franco during the summer was my best wishes and a pamphlet of useful American phrases, but, bless his heart, he held firm at both Seville-Cadiz and then Madrid -- all the way to the point of surviving through the last clear weather turn of 1944. Those Wallied armies in Spain would not reach the Rhine until the January-February '45 Game Turn at the earliest! I made a note to put flowers on Franco's tomb after that one.

Naturally, the Allies stomped my butt mercilessly this summer, and my other two "V" Weapons rolls were a Special Weapons Failure followed by a Special Weapons Success (which I used to zap a step out of Patton's 3rd Army and chip it down from its exalted 9-7-4 strength to a more manageable 5-5-3 size where it remained for most of the rest of the game). Gad! I needed Volkstrum results, and the die roll modifiers were stacked to give them to me, but it was not to be. Instead, I had another summer of spit-and-bailing wire fixes to my steadily pressed lines. I had fortified Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk so when the time came to fall back on the July-August '44 Game Turn those positions were left as road blocking "toothbreakers" to buy the rest of Army Group South some breathing room. It worked.

At the beginning of Autumn '44, shown here after my August- September turn was complete, things could have looked worse. I still held Antwerp (but not for long) and Minsk. Unfortunately, I had very little between the Red Army units operating just south of the Great Marsh and Lvov. I needed to figure out how I was going to hold both Rumania and the Balkans plus southern Poland. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure that out, so I did a massive shifting of forces up through Bessarabia and into the Lvov Gap. Thus, I created a strong line there (in southern Poland) and left the Balkans very scantily defended. I knew it would take the Soviets some time to drive through there just because they are so slow -- time enough, I hoped, to keep those Axis Strategic Hexes in Germany safe.

Meanwhile, Jack had to leave so Paul Abrahams and Allen Gies stepped in as the Wallies and Soviets, respectively. Paul was positioning his forces for a strike into Italy and, sure enough, his Autumn card was Operation Avalanche. He captured Turin and Italy collapsed. The situation was very fluid in Northern Italy for while, but Paul definitely came out the better from that situation. In France, Paul used this Blitz to bludgeon his way into Antwerp. It wasn't pretty, but he got the job done. Paul was going through armored steps like water and it was all he could do to keep his units at full fighting trim about half the time.

It was worse for Allen, though, on the Russian Front. Between his attacking in bad weather and almost universally getting Dr1 and Exchange results (both of which are Exchanges during bad weather) and my counterattacking the odd overextended Soviet tank unit, he'd bled his tank steps completely off the map! He was living card-to-mouth and even praying for more tank steps to arrive with Lend-Lease. That, and the amazing number of 6s he rolled at 2-1 and lower odds, kept the Axis armies in the East from being completely erased. I did my share of miracle working plugging the holes every turn (save one!), but I also had my share of luck watching the Soviet's stumble along on their offensives.

In the Winter of '44/'45 I sprang my Führer Offensive card and, historically, threw the kitchen sink at Antwerp. I was too extravagant, though, buying up my airborne corps and pouring steps into the West as I was being eaten for lunch in the Balkans and northern Yugoslavia. Still, my best shot was at Antwerp, so I went for it. The net result of my attack was that I lost five steps (about half my Seasonal Replacements) to the Wallies' four steps, but I did manage to get the city and shorten my lines. This was your basic pyrric victory and, in its aftermath, there was little comfort for the boys at OB West headquarters. Matters in the West were still far from satisfactory with the SHAEF Logistics Marker in Paris and hordes of Wallied soldiers still pouring in. Man, and those units are fast, too -- not like the Russians.

The real problem I had was in Italy where I couldn't seem to do anything right. I fortified Rome to divert his forces for a turn to recapture it, but I had no tricks left after that. I failed to keep him contained in Italy and that would prove to be decisive. Asta la pasta, baby.

In the East, I shored up the German lines in Prussia and Poland. With few tanks and no Soviet winter Blitz I thought I could hold things there until the Spring Season, which I did. Unfortunately, a big piece of the Red Army went marching into Rumania and there was little I could do about at but sit in Bucharest and wait for the lights to go out.

As Spring of 1945 began, pictured here as the Allies are about to move against your Humble Narrator, there was hope in the Reich. Time was running out and, if I could hold on, I would manage a Victory.

Although the Soviet pressure was steady and they made great strides in the Balkans, I was able to keep Athens (the only hex left down there that mattered to me) while losing Bucharest, Sofia, and Belgrade. I braced myself in Königsberg (which fell), Warsaw, and Budapest (both of which I retained). Operations in the East went from Hammer and Sickle to Hammer and Tongs and, in the end, I got to stick my tong out at the Red Army. Their bad luck continued right up to the end and, I think, I managed things pretty well against them. Ivan wasn't going to make it across the Vistula.

My big strategy, by the way, was to keep the Luftwaffe preserved and always use it to prevent the use of Soviet air power in the in East. For the rest of the game (after the Soviet '43 offensive), I would never see my armies in the East under a Soviet Air Support unit. In retrospect, I think that was a pretty smart decision and helped keep my pressured forces there retreating when they should have been dying. I think it had a huge impact there.

Unfortunately, doing this pretty much let the Wallied air forces roam at will. Because the Wallies played two No US Commit Level cards, though, I was able to keep a lot more of the Luftwaffe in play than I had any right to hope for, and what I did use in the West was enough to keep his fleets from doing anything too funky, save for an invasion of Southern Norway. [A note to Jim Winsor here -- notice I kept Hamburg garrisoned!]

Here you see the penultimate snapshot of events as the mud settled across the battlefields of Europe. My last trick was to break down my HQs on the Eastern Front and split those corps up to that other Axis Strategic Hexes would not fall into the vile clutches of the Western Allies. Granted, this would leave my lines with no HQs, but I was praying for the VE-Day Marker to mean something and the game to end when this turn was over. Stupidly, I moved my mountain corps to freeze both the Wallied forces in Prague and Breslau in the mud, forgetting that there was a mountain hexside between its resting place and Breslau. Consequently, on his last turn, Paul pushed the French 1st Army against Berlin, but was beaten back. (Medals all around, boys!) Still, I wish he had built Partisans in Yugoslavia instead of French forces. I hated seeing those guys in Germany...

What was really a delicious dilemma for me what what card would I choose to reveal in the Summer of '45 should the war drag on past the originally scheduled VE-Day? I was looking at two possible choices, National Redoubt would give me the damnable "Bunker" HQ unit in one of my German cities (complete with a permanent Command/Supply Failure radiating from it until it is destroyed by an obliging Allied Faction) but would also provide a massive (well, for me at this stage in the game "massive") four Conditional infantry steps each turn that the Bunker was around. That seemed like a lot of speed bumps and last ditch defenders to me so, playing it conservative, that's the card I selected. However, I was sorely tempted to try a Separate Peace and take my chances. As it turns out, I would have been looking at a 50/50 each turn of propositioning the jealous Soviets into stabbing their all-too-successful Western allies in the back and making this an every-faction-for-itself game. Had I achieved a Separate Peace, I really was in a good position to play both Allied powers off against each other. The Soviets were already in Teheran and the Balkans could have been a nice little War Zone for them to kick each other a bit. It would have been sweet, if only...

The end of our story is a bitter one. Your German Hero had a draw inflicted on him, snatched from the jaws of Victory as Paul gave the Reich an Austrian enema. His Spring '45 breakthrough could not be counter by me in the following mud turn, so Vienna, Prague, and Breslau were stolen from the Reich. However, I still held Oslo (which I quickly fortified and reinforced with my only spare unit, a panzer corps!), Athens, Budapest, and Warsaw -- all of which could easily have been goners had the game gone on another turn. Fortunately, I threw the VE-Day die and ended matters at this point.

The final count showed the Axis with Oslo and Athens to the good, but losing Madrid, Bucharest, Rome, Königsberg, Vienna, Prague, and Breslau to the bad. With a net count of -5, the Allied Crusade VP Marker ended in the 2 Box, enough to cancel the Axis No Retreat Marker also there, thus ending the game in a draw. Considering how my historical counterpart did, I'd claim this to be a German Moral Victory at the very least. <g>

Advice to the Soviets (by Allen Gies)
Go! (And I don't mean the Far East game)

The Soviet player should (and I should have) made and additional blitz effort to bring the house down on Hitler. The limit on Soviet Total War Blitz cards of one per calendar year can be mitigated by plugging in the useful Soviet Limited War Blitz cards, like Soviet Soviet Initiative and, and the end approaches, German Ultimatum. These cards should have been incorporated into my late war schedule regardless of how many infantry or tank steps the Red Army could gain by playing War Production cards instead. You can't count on another Game Turn after April-May 1945, and the Russian Army must be in Berlin no matter what the cost. At the end of our game, I had more than enough troops on the map but simply not enough territory -- and it almost cost us the draw!