The First Shots – Early-WW2 Bolt Action Battle Report

A year ago I finally finished painting my early war Polish army and was looking for a suitable scenario to deploy them on the table top. I hit upon Scenario 1 from the Bolt Action campaign book ‘Germany Strikes!’ which is about the defence of the Polish Post Office in Danzig. There were a few special units required, such as Steyr ADGZ armoured cars and several German light and medium artillery pieces. Doing some research into the actual battle, I was inspired to not only paint up the additional units, but to build the center piece of the battle, the massive Polish Post Office itself. (Use the tag ‘Polish Post Office Danzig’ to find the related posts on our blog.)

Last night Conscript Dallas hosted the game in the ‘Churchill Bunker’ with five other conscripts to command the Polish and German Forces. The Poles are superior in quality to the majority of German units, but they are significantly outnumbered and outgunned.  With the hard cover of the post office building, and the inexperience of the attackers, it would still be a difficult task for the Germans to capture the building.

The Polish Forces consisted of 2^nd Lieutenant Konrad Guderski, six rifle sections of four men, two light machine gun teams, and two grenade launcher teams. Guderski is a veteran with a +2 morale modifier, and the rest of his men are regulars. The Poles have a ‘No Where To Run’ special rule which allows them to re-roll failed morale tests. In addition, Guderski also has a ‘They Shall Not Pass’ special rule where he can set off a massive grenade charge which causes every model  within  a radius of 3” of him (including himself)  to take a hit with a +1 Penetration value.

The German Forces consisted of a mix of SS-Heimwehr Danzig, SA, and Ordnungspolizei, supported by two armoured cars, a medium machine gun team, two light howitzers, a medium howitzer and a small section of assault pioneers with a flamethrower and satchel charges. They would come on in three waves as follows:

1st Wave: 1 x 2nd Lieutenant, 2 x Ordnungspolizei Sections, 1 x MMG Team, 1 x Light Howitzer, 1 x Steyr armoured car, Deploy on the table anywhere outside 12” from the Post Office.

2nd Wave: 1 x 2nd Lieutenant, 3 x SS-Heimwehr Danzig Sections, 1 x Assault Pioneer (Sapper) Team, 1 x Medium Howitzer. Enter on Turn 3 from any board edge

3rd Wave: 1 x Sturmabteilung Section, 1 x Light Howitzer, 1 x Steyr armoured car.  Enter on Turn 4 from any board edge.

While the officers, support weapons, armoured cars, and sappers are regulars, the rest are all inexperienced with the SS-Heimwehr also rated as Green (on first casualty roll D6 - 1: extra D6 pins & go Down, 2-4: no effect, 5-6: upgrade to Regular), and the SA rated as Shirkers (always take order test, count pins as double).

The Polish defenders were trying to hold more rooms in the post office building than the Germans at the end of the game, which would last a minimum of 5 turns. At the end of that turn, there is a ⅔ chance of a sixth turn, with a ⅓ chance of a seventh.

Rather than have the Poles inside the building model, they were deployed on a grid off board designating the six rooms on each floor. Not knowing where the Germans were coming from, the Polish players deployed in ‘all round defence’

The Germans players deployed their first wave near the eastern end of the post office building, and began bringing artillery and machine gun fire on that part of the building. Initially the German artillery had little success, and the Polish defenders were able to take out the Germans’ MMG team. However, with the arrival of the second wave, things started to swing over to the Germans’ side. They were able to score a devastating hit with the medium howitzer that took out a rifle section, a grenade launcher team, and a LMG team.  Meanwhile two sections of SS-Heimwehr tried charging the front entrance of the post office, and the Assault Pioneers planted a satchel charge against the west end of the building. 

 

Although Polish casualties were mounting, the defenders successfully repelled some of the Germans rushing the front entrance. One Heimwehr section got upgraded to Regulars on receiving their first casualty, but later rolled a ‘FUBAR’ on their command check two turns in a row and ran off the game board. However, a section of Ordnungspolizei and an officer were able to get inside.  At that point the Polish commander set off a bag of grenades in the midst of the Germans that wiped out the squad, but due to the vagaries of the game rules, the Polish and German officers both managed to survive the blast.

Despite this brief success, the Germans gradually managed to gain the upper hand. Polish squads were forced to retreat to the south side of the building to avoid the German artillery fire, while the Steyr armoured cars started to drive around to that side to bring them under machine gun fire. Meanwhile the satchel charge blew a hole in the west wall allowing more German squads to enter the building. 

 

The game ran to the maximum seven turns with the Germans finally controlling more rooms than the Poles at the very end. This played out much as the historical battle. At the end of the game, I gave a brief summary of the fate of the Polish defenders. The players enjoyed the game, which hung in the balance until the final turn.  It was good to finally see all the newly painted units on the table top, as well as the model of the post office building. A few of the conscripts have suggested that the scenario would do well as a participation game at a wargames convention.  Until next time!

 

Scratch Built early-WW2 German Artillery

 The scenario for the assault on the Polish Post Office in Danzig called for a number of specialized units in the German order of battle, such as the Steyr ADGZ armoured cars. It also called for quite a number of artillery units that would be placed on the table top, something that rarely happens in our games. The Germans deployed a total of two 75mm Infantry Guns (7.5 cm leichtes Infanteriegeschütz 18) as well as a 105mm howitzer (10.5 cm leichte Feldhaubitze 18M). I had one of the former that I bought years ago when planning out a Dieppe scenario, which I have since painted, but I couldn't justify the cost of the additional guns which are likely to only see action in the streets of Danzig.

Here are some stills of the two types of artillery taken from film footage of the actual attack.

 Note that the version of the 75mm Infantry Gun still had spoked wheels as they were mainly horse drawn in many early war German infantry divisions. 

It was time to do some scratch building. Materials for the 75mm Infantry Gun were balsa, cardboard, paper, and bits of cork. The wheels were salvaged from some old Airfix HO Scale French Napoleonic Foot Artillery

The 105mm Howitzer was a bit more complicated, as well as being a bit trickier as I didn't have scaled dimensions. For the 75mm Infantry Gun, I had my unassembled Bolt Action model as a template, but I was winging it from photos for the 105. Here's the detailed parts list for all the bits and bobs that went into the model.

The recuperator cylinder is part of a wooden skewer from a restaurant burger. The barrel is part of a hollow plastic sucker stick. The breech block is a piece of cork. The cradle is a piece of a square wooden stick that came with a potted plant. The trail was cut from 2mm plastic card. The wheel tires are garden hose washers.  The wheels are seals from a milk carton plastic spout. The wheel hubs are paper circles cut with a hole punch. The gun shield and spades at the end of the trail were cut from old War Amps key tag. It is all held together with crazy glue, model glue, or epoxy depending on material.

 

Some of the dimension in the final assembly of the howitzer are a bit off, but it will do for the purposes of the scenario. If I had to do it again, the recuperator-barrel-carriage assembly should be mounted further forward, the trail should be 30% longer, and the gun shield a bit wider. Still, I am pretty happy with the final results.

 

I decided to mount the two guns on bases with a cobblestone pattern on them to resemble the streets of Danzig. Here is the 75mm Infantry Gun. The crew are from my Black Tree Design 75mm Pak 40.

And here is the 105mm Howitzer. I decided to make a mini-diorama on the base, inspired by the photograph of the actual gun in action. The spent shell casings are short sections of plastic insulation from some thin copper wire. I sealed one end with a dab of glue, and then painted them brass. The ammo boxes were made from some scraps of foamcore with a strip of paper glued around the edges to hide the stryofoam.

 

 

That pretty much completes the last of the necessary support weapons needed for the scenario. The workbench now is occupied by larger caliber anti-tank guns and kubelwagens. Stay safe out there, and I hope to see you all around the gaming table at some point in the future.

Polish Post Office Danzig (Polski Urzad Pocztowy Gdansk)

 The central feature of the first scenario of the Bolt Action campaign book, 'Germany Strikes - Early War in Europe' is the Polish Post Office in the Free City of Danzig. Constructed in the mid-19th century, the building was originally a Prussian military hospital (Garnison-Lazareth) until 1920 when it became the primary Polish post office with a direct telephone line to Poland. It was a target of Nazi vandalism leading up to the war, and was ultimately attacked by German paramilitary groups in the early morning of 1 September 1939.

 

The building is described in the scenario as follows: 

"The Post Office is a substantial building in the centre of the table. .... The ground floor of the Post Office consists of six 'small buildings'; rooms, tacked together in two rows of three. A first floor consists of six more rooms on top. All the rooms have windows to the outside, one per exterior wall. Ground floor windows and doors are barred so the only room that can be assaulted from outside is the centre front room where there is a main entrance. Alternatively sappers may be used to blow a hole into the ground floor room, allowing an assault from outside.

The ground around the Post Office should be clear for at least 12" in all directions. The rest of the area on the table is built up with buildings, streets, trees, walls and so on."

This description varies a bit from the historical layout. The original building had a long wing extending off the southwest corner, and it had a brick and wrought iron fence across the front of the building. Also there were a number of adjacent buildings that were situated quite close to the Post Office. Obviosuly, some compromises had to be made in the name of playability.

 Originally I had thought about making the structure so that the roof and the upper floor were separate pieces that could be lifted off, but eventually decided that it would be easier to have the room layout of the different floors off board and build the Post Office as a single piece. I looked for some good colour photographs of the Post Office online, and I was able to do some photo editing to create two files that could be printed off and glued to a structure made of foam core. For the roof detail, I scanned a sheet of Faller embossed cardboard with a red tile pattern that was left over from a project I did decades ago.  The roof itself was made of cardboard from cases of Lipton Iced Tea, and some 3D detail added to the front of the building using 3mm thick cardboard which also supported the dormer above the main entrance. The final features were the chimneys and the downspouts located either side of the main entrance. 

Here are some pics of the construction in progress.

Here is the end result. The final dimensions are L 56cm x W 15cm x H 23cm. I also made two additional terrain bits to mark where the sappers had successfully breached the outer walls of the building.

With the main terrain feature now complete, it's time to work on some early war Germans, especially the support weapons that were used in the attack. More to follow.