ASL Diary ep. 3: SASL Bunker Busting

Once again I failed to take photos so a text report from my first Solitaire ASL outing after several years' hiatus will have to suffice.

The mission was Bunker Busting from the outskirts of a village on board 11 into the huge forest covering most of board 5.

The company was in good shape (full size and more than half were already battle hardened 4-6-8 veterans). I only received a single section of engineers and used them on the right flank where I suspected some buildings to be fortified and strongly held.

However, my initial relief to face the enemy (with a huge amount of ? all over the woods) with a low enemy AC# of 2 soon turned into near despair - although I sent several courageous half squads spread out across most of the front checking out the many potential enemy hideouts (I only avoided the few ? hexes on the very left flank) they encountered nearly no opposition at all, except for a few unentrenched stragglers.

Halfway through the game I started to get seriously worried that I would not even find enough potential VPOs to balance the VPs the enemy would surely get (1 for my engineers section, a handful for ? remaining on board and some casualty VPs). I had just started to run my engineers with the two remaining DCs across the complete width of the board to help subdue the one pillbox I had managed to find (of course, that was on my weak left flank that I had initially planned to hold only...), when the first of two surprizes hit me: a convoy of six horse drawn transport led by a T37 came driving along a road on my left flank, apparently unaware of our advance into their route.

The transports didn't carry many troops and the T37 fell after several rounds of inconclusive firefights with my ATR teams (providing some much needed additional VPs) but the exchange blocked my lateral movements enough so that my poorly led, often panicking troops on the left had to take the pillbox alone.

They had just managed to do that when another surprize hit: apparently, some other parts of the Soviet machinery had noticed our advance after all and sent a seven hex human wave crashing through the woods we had just cleared. They caught my company commander with just one half squad who was on the move after mopping up a lonely foxhole in the woods, and I barely managed to extract him after reinforcing the close combat with all available troops (just a few heavy weapons teams who were trailing the other squads on their way to the left flank). After this skirmish and another with a straggling squad of mine that fortunately broke under the Soviet advance fire in time to retire without melée, the wave just rampaged on through the part of the forest I had already cleared of any enemy presence without encountering any VPO locations.

So at the end I managed to pull off a close, very low scoring win (would have been even closer without the T37 chugging along) and lost three half squads to various Soviet stragglers.