Fall of France: Crossing the Meuse-"O" Group

This past Wednesday, we had a game of "O" Group. We had not played for this ruleset for 18 months so we were quite rusty. I had watched the videos from TFL before the game so I was some what prepared, but there was a lot of referring to the rulebook.

This was my first real test of playing "O" Group in 6mm using centimetres rather than inches for movement and ranges. I like Dave Brown's rules but all my WWII troops are 20mm and I did not believe they would work for a battalion level game. I was not interested in investing a lot of money or time into doing figures and terrain so I decided to go with 6mm as I had quite a few figures on hand especially AFV's from my Rommel project. More importantly, however, I have space and transport issues so I decided to go small.

The 1940 Fall of France supplement was release a little over a year ago, so I thought I would print up some French AFV's and paint them. I am waiting for the early war Eastern Front supplement as I had initially done up German and Soviet forces for the game. The Fall of France supplement contains a 6 scenario campaign so I said why not start with that. I have been working on terrain for WWII 6mm so I was all set.

In the this scenario, the Germans have crossed the River Meuse and were attempting to consolidate their bridgeheads. Our scenario takes place at the Dinant bridgehead on May 14, 1940 and documents the French counterattack. 

The French are attacking from the bottom of the terrain. The terrain is 2x3'.

The French have a 3 company battalion from the 18th Infantry Division, supported by an MMG platoon, a Reconnaissance platoon of AMR 35's as well as Renault R35 platoon. They are the attacker in this scenario. The Germans have also a 3 company battalion with a MMG section in support as well as an ATG platoon of Pak36's and a PzII platoon. All units on both sides are rated as regular. Victory for the French would be placing 3 Fubars on the Germans.

We got through 6 turn of a planned 16 turn game, which I actually thought was pretty good for the first go in 18 months. I believe we played all the mechanics of the game except for close combat, and after 6 turns the Germans had 2 Fubars and the French one. So we called it a French victory with the French earning 2 Victory Points to the German's one.

I will not go into great detail, I was playing the German Defenders with P-Y playing the French. By the end of the game I had all my troops on the table but I believe the French still had an infantry company in reserve and only half of Company B deployed. Her are some photos of the game.

German HQ with 2 Artillery Supports

PzII platoon

German right flank

The German left flank, Company Commanders on both side were quite aggressive in pushing their troops forward, the French MMG section next to the forest in the top right of the photo really chopped up the Germans and I believe they must of killed around 6 sections.

The German troops in the BUA were not well protected by French Artillery strikes.

The Pak36 ATG platoon did take out a R35, causing the 1 French Fubar.

I quite enjoyed the game and I spent all yesterday going through the rule book finding answers to questions we had as well as discovering the errors we made. Most questions were easily answered with a careful review of the rulebook but it did take a lot of thinking to figure out how Reserves were deployed, but I think I have it now. We did make quite a few errors so I have put together a cheat sheet for our next game.

In respect to playing the game in centimetres, it actually went much better than I would have thought. The infantry bases are 20x15mm but were easy enough to handle. Two things are needed though when playing at this scale, you really can not use a tape measure so I will but together some standard measuring sticks (14cm, 18cm and 30cm) as well as a couple of 20cm sticks gradated in cm. I am also going to try to find some Blast templates of 4, 5, 6 cm radius's. Finally, I aim still not happy with my fields so I need to work on them.