I’m playing this game against my friend Isaac, who, at great peril to his marriage, has agreed to play another monster game with me. I am still relatively inexperienced, with five games against live opponents under my belt, including one against Sparkleytits as the Germans, and this is Isaac’s first campaign against a live opponent, though we played the Road to Leningrad scenario as his first game. We have chosen a pro-Soviet set of options: +1 attack and full blizzard. We have a gentleman’s agreement about reloading save games – only if you have made a really dramatic error through misunderstanding of the rules, and you must inform the assembled multitudes. We are going to keep an AAR, posted two turns after the events described, and I am going to be pretty open about my plans. The western Allies are reading all of Hitler’s mail because of ULTRA, and we will assume that they are passing useful stuff on to Stalin.
So my first Axis turn in the Sparkleytits game went rather conventionally. I have done a few new things in this game. First, I transferred XXXXVI Panzer Corps from 2nd Panzergruppe to 1st. This is instead of the normal approach of sending 1st Panzergruppe towards Minsk, or the alternative approach I have seen in some AAR’s of sending it south of the marshes with the goal of creating a second pocket west of Zhitomir. I want the southern pocket to be solid and I will worry about the rest of the southern forces later. When a new panzer unit comes in September, I will give them to 2nd Panzergruppe. In the mean time, their job is to keep the Soviets amused in the center.
Because my principal strategic goal is two-fold: capture Leningrad before the mud and get across the Dnepr. I’d like to take the Crimea if I can but I’ll try to avoid the mistakes I made down there in my game with Sparkleytits. I’m not expecting to take any factory cities with their factories in place, though if I do get an early breakthrough in the south, my goals will be Kharkov (a T-34 factory) and Voronezh (with all of the USSR’s IL-2 production). I’m not aiming for Moscow, though I want to make the Soviet defenders commit significant forces to defending it. If they look weak in there, I’ll take the opportunity to advance in that sector. I’m not planning to go to far into the Russian interior, considering the potential for a serious Russian counter-attack in the winter months. I certainly don’t want to have any forces out of supply in November-December.
I began with my opening air campaign. I surveilled every field, rebased my bombers as close to the border as I could and thought about some long-range strikes. However, I ended up concentrating on the front-line airfields with the exception of the Black Sea Fleet Air Command fields in the Crimea, which have the largest concentration of IL-4’s that are within Axis fighter range on turn 1. The screen shot below is from the end of the turn, after I overran several of his air bases and pushed loss numbers up from about 2850 in the initial attack. I also used bombers that had not been shot out in the early going to attack some rear area bases at the end of the turn. These losses are a little ahead of historical but not huge compared with some other AAR’s I’ve read.
