El Guettar Turns 9 and 10

Our El Guettar campaign continues, slowly, but surely.  I have already covered turn 9 in detail in a previous post. 

Turn 10 saw a return of the same US force that fought in turn 9.  The Germans, however, were another story.  Tim decided to go back to the Panzer Grenadiers for this game.  He took the CO and two platoons in half-tracks.  He had a couple of PaK38 and some 105 artty.  The icing on the crap cake was not one but two Tigers!  And if that was not enough he also had air support.  This was going to suck but I knew I only needed 2 VP in order to capture El Guettar so I was ready.

The scenario for this battle was Hold the Line with the US defending.  I have come to the conclusion that I am not very good at these Defensive Battles as the defender.  I have a very hard time making good decisions as it relates to reserves and deployed units and this game would be no different.  I started the game with an HMG platoon, an infantry platoon and the 105 artillery on the table.  Why?  I couldn't tell you other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The objective placement for this scenario seems to follow a predicable pattern - defender places an objective marker in the center-rear and the attacker place one forward towards one side.  Naturally, Tim would move his Tigers towards the near objective so I placed my artillery there...then I realized that they cannot do much to the front of a Tiger.  This really set the tone for the rest of the game.

In the end, the game became a slugging match for the near objective.  I was able to get my reserves in and gradually fed them into the German meat grinder.  The Germans would win the game but could only manage a 4-3.  The Americans capture El Guettar!

The current campaign scores are:

Victory Points
US - 37
Germans - 33

Casualties
US - 170
Germans - 95

Vehicles lost
US - 58
Germans - 50

Guns lost
US - 7
Germans - 7

For the next campaign I think we will track planes shot down.  The Germans have lost a lot of planes.