Battle of Razgulaevka Station - Conclusion

You might have thought that I was using a journalistic ploy in leaving the previous part of this After Action Report hanging.......but actually I find that the longer the blog post and the more photos, the more unreliable the technology gets. You can see from the final skewed photo caption that the jeopardy was not in the wargame as much as in the author's worry if he would lose the report!

Elsewhere things were also happening:

Mark brought on 1st Battalion 21st Panzer Grenadier Regiment powering up the
roads in their half tracks. The infantry up the left flank to reinforce the Engineer company
and the artillery support in the central road to give weight to the defence of the station.

The Panzer IV company was sent straight up the road through the station complex and
out the other side, machine guns blazing on the Russian infantry clinging grimly to
 some cover. At this point the German 517th infantry had suffered quite severe
casualties and were glad of the heavy metal support to counter attack.

It was about this time that the Russian 124th Rifle Brigade suffered its 20th casualty and needed a morale check. They got "No offensive action" so just ground to a halt, firing back where they could. frankly they had lasted longer than I expected, partly due to a run of below average dice rolls by Mark early in the game.

Across the road 2nd Battalion 112th Rifles had deployed, only just in time to add 1
in support to the next Morale check of now much depleted 124th.
The latter had not only received a further dose of casualties but just lost their CO to mortar fire.
 So Minus for his loss,  Minus for second Morale test and Minus for being "Poor"
as they started very low on men and equipment. I rolled a '2' so no chance !
Those in the station ruins surrendered and the rest fled.

And what about that Morale check for the T34 company? I ended up with a '0' for them and they retreated two moves which coincided with the late arrival of the Stuka support. Oberst Freimann had earlier got his Air Link half track in a commanding position on Razguelaevka Railway bridge, received a radio message from the CO 517th about the tanks on the flank and ordered the air support to deal with them. Mark's first bombing run missed, but he still had two more chances to damage the fleeing tanks.

Conclusion
We had played for about 5 hours, obviously slowed by explaining procedures to a newcomer, but still lots of units hardly yet in action. Time had to be called and the two adverse Morale checks for my Russians made it an easy decision to declare Mark the winner of his first wargame. While his infantry in the station were nearing  a critical strength, he had good hard cover and supports and was unlikely to fail morale. The tanks and Panzer Grenadiers and Elite Assault Engineers were well placed to sweep through and destroy the ill equipped infantry battalions facing them in the open. I thoroughly enjoyed it and Mark felt a lot of the time as though he was going to fail, so it was an exciting and successful game. In my view the change of scale had worked a treat, giving plenty of scope for manoeuvre yet with some long range fire. Keeping the movement distances the same maintained the momentum of the game and allowed both sides to get to close quarters when it mattered.  I'm going to need two to three times this amount of models and a lot more ruins when I host a game for the whole group in November, but I'm now quietly optimistic.

Meanwhile....back to the Waterloo madness!