OctoBear!!!

Shortly after the turn of the century (and by century I mean a proper century, the twentieth, not the tawdry modern crap we've been enduring for the past decade and a half) HG Wells wrote a story about a demented scientist who bore a faint resemblance to Marlon Brando dying of morbid obesity and his efforts to create new forms of life by what would now be called gene splicing but basically involved stitching embryos together.  Consider it Frankenstein for beginners.

The most fearsome creature this maniac managed to breed was the dreaded octobear; seven feet tall, eight arms, shaggy fur, a beak and a predilection for seafood.  Actually the octobear turned out to be non viable as Doctor Moreau could have told you if you could understand a word the drooling, mumbling slob was saying.  Nevertheless the seed had been sown (and will no doubt be stitched to another seed by Moreau's botanically minded cousin in the sequel).  After fifteen grim years of waiting this monstrous experiment has finally born fruit.  Hairy tentacled fruit but fruit nonetheless.  OctoBear is here!

Actually OctoBear is past.  It happened last weekend.  OctoBear is the competition that my wargaming club holds each October.  It is called OctoBear to differentiate it from JunoBear which happens in August, sorry June.  Our wargaming club is called the Paddington Bears and only the absence of a website saves us from some very embarrassing misunderstandings.  I wandered along to take part and match my skills against my like minded colleagues in three rounds of hardcore, no prisoners ASL action.

For those people who read these after action reports in the faint hope that I might win one someday let me save you the effort.  For those who take a sadistic delight in my recounting my perennial inability to actually achieve anything in a game I have been playing for twenty odd years; read on.

Young Man's Trail

The first scenario pitted Americans against Japanese in a scenario called Young Man's Trail.  The Japanese had to defend a position in the middle of the jungle at the top of a steep ridge.  The Americans had to attack uphill against the concealed defenders.  For the Americans it would be rather like attacking up a steep flight of stairs in the middle of the jungle next to a bunch of well concealed guys trying to kill them.  Actually it would be exactly like that.  I took one look at the scenario and decided to bid for the Japanese.  So did my opponent Richard Weilly.  A totally random decision making event later and I was taking the Americans.

The rather faded photo above shows the terrain.  I would enter from the bottom and attempt to plough my way up some very steep hills to more or less the top.  Richard, already occupying the top would try and stop me.  There was a patch of open ground in my entry area that I decided to avoid like the plague.  Instead I decided on a flanking attack.  The bulk of my force would slog through the jungle (and up the hill) on the left while a smaller force did likewise on the right.  The one advantage I possessed was that with dense jungle in effect nobody could actually see each other until they more or less walked on top of each other.  Thus most of my approach could be made in safety.  Unfortunately that safety cut both ways.

Here you see my guys, already covered in counter exhaustion markers straining upwards while Richard is happy to sit there and wait until my sweat lathered heroes stagger exhausted into their crosshairs.  There is is fact a narrow path on the left which I'm angling towards to make the climb a little less dreadful.  The guys on the right didn't really divert anyone.

I made a serious mistake in attempting to shoot his guys as I climbed.  What with the exhaustion, the thick jungle and his concealment I couldn't scratch the defenders while they being fresh proved somewhat more capable of shooting me in return.  In retrospect I should have concentrated on reaching the summit and then trying to deal with the enemy.  By attempting to do both at once I failed at both at once.

Despite enemy fire and my own inadequacies I did manage to get some troops near the top but I was running desperately short of time.  In despair I launched my surviving troops into close combat with the nearest defenders.  If I could kill them possibly I could advance towards the victory locations.  I didn't kill them.  I didn't kill any of them.  They killed me.  All of me.  Not one guy I sent into combat survived.  Not one of them inflicted the slightest harm on the enemy (ambush, concealed, CX attackers, hand to hand combat).  I wasn't really surprised, it was a tactic of despair not common sense.  Unfortunately commonsense would have been more useful a couple of turns previously.  Victory to Richard while I sat sulking and considered overdosing on my malaria medication.

Denecke in Denial

The next scenario was much closer which is to say that I was defeated without being utterly humiliated.  Swapping the jungles of Papua New Guinea for the ruined factories of Kharkov.  The German army was in full retreat and had tagged a few lucky fellows to stay behind and cover the departure.  These guys, hunkered down in buildings were treated to a full collection of Soviet storm troops, T-34 tanks and local partisans wielding molotov cocktails.  Said heroic champions of the Rodina were handicapped by being commanded by me.  The increasing desperate Germans were under the wise tutelage of Ivan Kent.

The two forces set up pretty much on top of each other with the exception of a building in the German rear which is occupied partially by wounded Germans and partially by Russian civilians who were busy lighting wicks leading into vodka bottles.  My team had to seize and hold a number of victory locations which Ivan was resolved to defend grimly to the death.  He did.

This is the starting set up, my ace in the hole was a pair of T-34 tanks.  Ivan had a single 50mm antitank gun hidden somewhere and I felt the the more or less open space to the right was the most likely.  Thus I made my main push on the left including threading both tanks through the narrow streets in support.  A small force went to the right to keep him honest.  Close observers will note this is pretty much the same tactic that failed miserably in the last game.  It wouldn't fail miserably in this one.  Well, not miserably anyway.

The first turn or so was light on shooting as my tanks and troops skirted his defences and started swinging in from the left.  Ivan responded by pulling his guys back into the large factory in the top middle of the picture.  I pressed forward in what turned out to be a brutal slugging match which, with the aid of tank cannons and machine guns I eventually won.

In back play my partisans were taking on his walking wounded in close combat and being surprisingly successful until a reinforcing self propelled gun forced a pause.  Fortunately I roared a reinforcing tank of my own up behind it and completely failed to destroy it.  But this was an infantry game and my accompanying squad advanced boldly into close combat and blew the thing up.  It then charged into the building to reinforce my partisans and broke another of his squads.  Naturally I got greedy and shot at the squad again resulting in a heat of battle roll that restored the squad to full effectiveness and threatened my hold on the building.

Back in the big factory I was slaughtering Ivan's defenders but time was ticking away and the victory locations were tantalisingly out of reach.  I eventually got to most of them but Ivan had bought time with lives and at the end while virtually his entire force was dead I was just short of the locations I needed to win.

Above is the end game, there are virtually no Germans left but the buildings on the right are not in my hands and they needed to be.  Still by comparison with the rest of the weekend I was actually pleased with this game.

Liehr Launches First

The final game completed the circle by pitting Germans against Americans in a late war (1945) counter attack.  The Americans were planning to attack but the Germans got there first, hence the title of the scenario.  The Germans had four tanks, including two mighty panthers, to support their thirteen squads of attackers.  The American defenders were bolstered by a pair of immobilised M10 tank destroyers and would gain three M18 tank destroyers as reinforcements.  More importantly they had a pair of 60mm mortars.

I got the Germans in this scenario and I wasn't particularly happy about it.  Despite the tanks it seemed to me that the Germans had rather an uphill battle on their hands.  They started off at one end of a village and had to reach the other end despite the presence of a large number of bazooka toting Americans in their path. 

The above is the starting point.  My forces are on the right and need to get points left.  I planned to push the bulk of my troops building to building through the village, slow but effective, supported by three tanks while the equivalent of three squads (including a halfsquad toting a panzerschreck) wormed through the patch of woods on a flanking mission.  I expected his M10s to be in this area, hence the schreck, and I bolstered the attack with a panther nosing around the edge of the woods.  I trusted to its impressive frontal armour to protect it from fire.  Unfortunately I should have been more concerned with its roof armour.

My opponent Mark McGilchrist had positioned both his mortars in another patch of woods opposite.  When my panther showed its face he promptly gained a critical hit on it with a mortar.  This not being sufficient his second shot scored snake eyes on the to kill roll thus immobilising the beast.  The panther crew would subsequently break the main armament and then destroy it while attempting to make repairs.  With the panther stopped Mark turned his mortars onto my guys in the woods and slaughtered them.  At the end of the first turn my three squads had been reduced to a single broken squad hiding in a building behind the lines.

I kept the other three tanks close and tried, with a signal lack of success, to use them as fire support.  About the only useful thing that one of them did was fire a smoke shell which gave a little cover to the remainder of my infantry.  I really don't use armour well.

With my flank shattered I was reduced to a frontal crawl.  This had some success for the simple reason that Mark used a fall back defence, allowing me short advances in return for keeping his force intact.  Probably the most harm was done to his force when he voluntarily broke squads in order to retreat them more effectively.  Bazookas and his reinforcing tank destroyers wiped out the rest of my armour but my infantry did persist in grinding forward.  Finally we were getting to the point where Mark would have to stand and fight.  He was ready but my infantry was in good shape too.  I sent three squads against one in close combat.  Of course I didn't hurt him and he killed one of my squads.  Things went on in much the same fashion and it was soon obvious I wasn't going to get anywhere near the victory locations.  Additionally, free from any threat his armour was now rolling all over the board.  Finally when Mark rolled snake eyes on a low odds shot and I rolled boxcars on the ensuing morale check I decided enough was enough and surrendered.  I could have carried on for another turn and got a little closer to the victory locations but there really wasn't any point.  Sigh, more defeat.

So that was OctoBear and at the end of it I felt as though I'd been attacked by a giant furry animal with eight tentacles, or possibly that's the malaria medication kicking in.  Much thanks to Andy Rogers who organised it and to my opponents who quite frankly had to put up with some appalling language over the course of three games.  I slunk off to lick my wounds and plan my revenge.  At least that's my story, actually I went home and sulked.