EW Polish infantry vs Germanschützen AAR

Sorry for the crappy pictures, had to snap photos with my phone which I specifically bought for making calls and nothing else (cellphone technophobe and touch screen hater that I am).

In any case, played some Flames of War with Johan down at the club this weekend. I wanted to try out a really crazy Polish list since I had painted up additional infantry platoons since the last time. The list was far from good or optimized, I really just wanted to field my new stuff. So what I ran was a "Piechoty batalion" 1500pts list that looked like this:

Battalion HQ 

1st Company: 2 platoons + hmg platoon

2nd Company: 2 platoons + hmg platoon

2x Anti-tank gun platoon

cavalry company: 2 platoons

Reconnaissance tank platoon: 3 TKS MG tankettes


So a ton of infantry, some cavalry, little  AT and nothing else. If I had to attack I would probably be screwed. If I had to defend I would most likely have a difficult time , but the enemy would have to shoot his way past 10 platoons, 5 of which were 12-13 bases strong.


Johan showed up with a 1500pts German Schützenkompanie

HQ

3x Schützen platoons

1x Pak36 platoon

1x HMG platoon

1x Mortar platoon

3 PzIIIA tanks

1x 105mmbattery



.....................
The scenario was "Breakthrough" and I ended up as the defender (thankfully). The table, was covered in terrain, and featured a town in one corner and a forest in the diagonally opposite corner. So I grabbed those two as my deployment areas and set up HMG platoons in the buildings, two infantry platoons and 1 AT gun platoon in each sector. My forest area also saw the deployment of cavalry and tankettes as I figured I would need all the help I could muster to run up and grab those objectives before Johan saw the arrival of his reinforcements (AT gun platoon and two infantry platoons with attached HMG's). My luck was in being able to deploy all 10 platoons on the table right away.

Johan had a comparatively tiny force on the table. 3 basic PzIIIA's , a platoon of infantry, mortars, HMG's and 105mm guns. Of that only the tanks and infantry were really something to attack with.  Despite all of this I wasn't even remotely sure that I would automatically win, and indeed made some stupid mistakes during turn 1 with units moving about that should not have been moving - but I have simply not played FoW that much over the last two months.

Johan started the game launching an assault on the city, I too had thoughts of launching an assault in that area and try to kill that artillery. Now I saw German smoke drop on my flanking platoon followed by a brave charge that saw no less than 5 teams killed! My guys counterattacked, beat up a couple of German teams and then took 3 more casualties. I finally made the Germans turn tail and withdraw but had at that time lost 8 teams and had only 5 left in that infantry platoon that took up the pursuit.

My remnants caught up with the German platoon and fired at them killing a couple teams and then got pinned down as they tried to clean things up with a final assault. My guys ended up running away, but so did the Germans that remained. So we had lost 1 infantry platoon each.

That would not be all that bad if I had not gotten the stupid idea of moving out my HMG's to get in range with Johan's artillery. As soon as the Germans saw my Poles leave the building they hit them with a mortar barrage killing 2 HMG teams. Then fired with artillery and tanks on the buildings housing my second HMG platoon, effectively disabling the whole village with pinned down and heavily bled units.

I was now in the middle of relocating infantry and cavalry towards both objectives, I wanted to get there before the German turn 3 and the German reinforcements. I also moved out with my AT guns when I realized I had to worry more about the tanks on my right flank rather than have them arrive from reserves into my field of fire near the objectives. It's funny how 3 tanks with relatively weak armor are able to rattle things up, they became my main focus for the remainder of the battle. I tried to do something about them with sparse AT gun fire and infantry small arms to no avail. In the end I withdrew the guns and parked them in a way so that I could create a crossfire across the objectives if the tanks wanted to make a go for them.

My cavalry and tankettes reached the objective in the small forest first, tankettes entered the treeline and cavalry dismounted and spread out to face the imminent arrival of German troops. Of course I failed to dig in with the cavalry the following turn just as the Germans arrived.

Fortunately Johan had really poor luck with the dice, I think he rolled something like 12 dice and managed to kill a single dismounted cavalry team. I gambled and dared to move my guys so that I could optimize the amount of firing teams and tankettes, this meant that I fired at -1 penalty with the infantry and ended up bogging down 1 out of the 3 tankettes. However once I rolled the dice I decimated that German platoon, and the remaining Germans were unable to stop my assault which saw the rest of the teams wiped out.

Johan's tanks had been driving around taking shots at anyone who would dare to show their face, they also attracted the attention of my sailors who started moving towards the tanks as I thought I could perhaps make a crazy 3 platoon assault on them and destroy them in close combat - but then turned back with my mind set on supporting the cavalry and infantry near the objectives.

In the end Johan surrendered because it was impossible for him to win, he had 2 platoons left in reserve but only 1 managed to get onto the table, and it would no doubt face the same fate as the previous German platoon. The objectives were locked down by some 40+ teams including 5 AT guns so there was no way for the Germans to do much about the situation.

So my freaky infantry horde managed to pull off a victory. I had lost 1 infantry platoon, 1 HMG platoon and a few teams from various other platoons but nothing that brought them anywhere near breaking point. Johan had lost 2 infantry platoons, one of them with attached HMG's. I said that if Johan had one more platoon of tanks he would have had little problem handling my force and I absolutely dont' take this victory as a sign of my army list being superior. If I'm going to run something like this again I will most likely drop 1 infantry platoon in favor of a 3rd AT Gun platoon and have the Tankettes strength maxed out.

My sailors didn't get to do anything in this battle, which was a bit of a shame. On the other hand the cavalry proved to be a fantastic asset and will most likely be a standard part of my armies in the future as well. A company with 2 platoons is just perfect size for that "objective grab/defend" situation. The cavalry being Fearless/Veteran also helps them to stay alive while waiting for backup.