Battle Report - 18 Aug 2019 - "Bloody Omaha" at The Other Partizan

Loot haul - two blisters from Bad Squiddo Games (which are lovely and will see use soon!)

Spent most of the day (barring a couple of brief diversions) umpiring Bloody Omaha. An excellent day - one young gentlemen stayed pretty much all day and handled the bulk of the American attack.

We never got to wave 3, but by turn 8 the Americans had several breaches in the wire, having come under some pretty serious hammer early on - 2/3 of wave 1 was late, so the Germans had opportunity to concentrate their fire early on. The German artillery wasn't as effective as it could have been - partly Carl and I were swapping umpiring/running the Germans, and there was perhaps a lack of continuity for such things as 'are we walking the fire up the beach?'.

General Cota made it on in wave 2 (yes, I know he should be several beach sectors over, on Dog White, but Robert Mitchum in the rôle is a very iconic image and I couldn't resist :D) He led an advance up the western edge of the beach, almost directly at WN64 which was slow but being quite successful,..

Herewith a gallery with comments (largely me nitpicking, because the camera is unforgiving and it's my game and I can!):

All set up and ready to play. Newly watered marshes front and centre, as well as All The Beach Obstacles and some copious use of Woodland Scenics mid-green lichen. A no-prize if you can tell me what I forget to pack... (There are in fact two things.)

This is probably the one thing that really bugs me about the game that isn't fixable - the board joins. Sadly because of wear and tear and in some cases slightly out of tolerance boards, they can be very visible, even though we hide them with lichen and barbed wire, That said, the original plan was always a modular board (and we do reuse some of the hills in other games), so the square tiles and 'stepped' look are a deliberate design choice. Also, I need to glue the wire on to the barbed wire bases so it sits flatter on the ground.

Flames of War LCV(P) with passengers. I should retouch a couple of helmets but on the whole they've pretty evocative: I would very much like if Battlefront redid the castings when they announce the Higgins boat for the new late war range, as they are a bit scuzzy and a swine to get a brush in the gaps, even more so when you can't easily spot what's what on the casting!

Need to retouch the bases on the mine stakes tp match the shallows rather than the deeper water. Usefully it's AP Army Green, I think, so easy to match... 

An LCV(P) gets hit on its way in... Rob suggested a few floating body markers (and I thought I was obsessive!) :D  It's a good job I have two packs of those explosion markers as as far as I can tell neither of the folks I bought them from still make them! 

I love this shot - taken low over the hills at the back of the table, it almost hides the stepped contours of the board.  

A new addition for this game (in case you missed me rabbiting on about it) was photographer Robert Capa., who appears on wave 1 on one Higgins boat and must leave with one of the empty wave 3 boats. He's very much being portrayed here as the legend, rather than what might be the truth....

...customised from a PSC heavy weapons team guy...

He has a card in the deck. On an activation, he has three actions with which he can move 1d6 each, or use one or two to take a photograph (much like AFV fire in IABSM, a second action means he takes time to compose his shot...) We then roll 1d6, + 3 if aimed, plus 1-3 at the umpire's discretion for choice of subject (the player gets to say what he wants to photograph). Still tuning the numbers, but a total score of 50+ means he gets to keep his job, 100+ means he becomes a legend. -50 for missing the boat back to England (and thus his press deadline).

And just for giggles, we get an iPhone down to board level and 'take' the photo (and crop it and turn it B&W).

So, here's Capa's portfolio for the Magnum agency for Life magazine from The Other Partizan...  

We have the Capa version of this iconic shot on our banner for the game. Part of me is really tempted to have a Higgins boat modelled with its ramp down expressly for Capa... 

This is Capa's original... I also find myself wondering if I can find a small HD spy cam that would fit IN or on a 15mm Higgins boat :D And whether a backdrop behind the boards would look effective...

A BAR team from the Big Red One taking cover in the shallows. The team medic can be seen slightly out of focus right of centre. 

Big Red One rifle sections shelter under a ramp obstacle. 

German artillery plasters the beach - observe the elements of both the Big Red One and the 29th sheltering on the shingle below the sea wall while Capa himself takes cover behind a log ramp.

A mortar section of E company 16th RCT of the Big Red One takes cover behind a 'Czech hedgehog'.  Ahead, engineer elements of E company are attempting to breach the wire protecting the exit from the beach.

So there you go. Thank you to everyone who played, came and said hi, or said nice things, to Carl, Rod and Rob for helping run the game, AndyM (as ever) for scenery, Rich Clarke for the original scenario, and thank you to the Other Partizan folks for inviting us!

Stop me if you've heard this before... (I'll get my Cota)

More bazooka teams and landing craft passengers, and (after a look under the harsh light of the camera) some touch ups on the General and Mr. Capa.

Oh, and some show admin. 

Just... more olive drab.... and General Cota

Nothing exciting to see here, move on....

Well, OK, I did get General Cota painted (in the style of Robert Mitchum from The Longest Day), as a distraction from 110 not quite identical 15mm figures..

Olive drab, anyone...

Working my way through 110 helmets and assault jackets, and 36 bazookas, in olive drab in 15mm. At least I've found the daylight magnifier, which makes painting Battlefront's somewhat scuzzy sculpts a little better than it might otherwise be. Come what may, these are only being done to 2'-test tabletop standard :D

For those who may have missed it on Twitter earlier, I've done the first water pour for the marsh boards: it's sufficiently warm that (unlike last time, when it was March and bloomin' freezing in the workshop) the Woodland Scenics stuff may actually dry in the advertised time.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

Marshy goodness

Starting to get the marshy bits of the Omaha boards back to a state I''m happy with.

The texture from yesterday has dried, so earlier I took a selection of suitably swampy greens and browns and painted the bottoms. Once that had dried, I got out some PVA and some 10mm static grass, and basically built grass tufts in situ. Simple, really: dap a spot of PVA where you want the tuft, then take a generous pinch of grass and sort of pull it half of it out through your fingers so what you're left holding is mostly aligned, then dab the end into the PVA and lift up...

As you can see, it does the trick!

Once this has dried, which may not be tonight, I may do a little more touch up work and then I'm going to take advantage of those boards being on the only accurately levelled surface (thanks, Tim the builder) in the workshop, and do the Woodland Scenics water pour.

DIY texture filler.

Recipe courtesy of Luke of Lukes APS on YouTube.

Basically, it's some cheap filler, some cheap burnt umber acrylic paint from Hobbycraft and a bit of sand. All mixed together in a Gü chocolate mousse pot until... well,. until it has the texture and colour of the original contents of the pot, really. The filler Luke suggests is the quick-drying stuff, but I wound up with some finer texture stuff that takes a bit longer, so I'm going to have to leave the next stage on the Omaha marsh boards till tomorrow.

More reading/listening

Not much chance for practical hobby stuff yesterday, as I was off to Hull for my annual eye checkup. Having time to listen to stuff on the train, I was continuing my way through D-Day Through German Eyes Book 2 (link to Kindle version) - interesting stuff. Basically, it's pretty literal transcripts of interviews with German survivors of D-Day, that were conducted in the 50s by the author's grandfather while writing for 'Die Wermacht' magazine. A wide range of accounts, many with vastly differing views on the war, the French, the British, the Americans...

Browning FP-45 - CC BY 4.0,
from https://digitaltmuseum.se/011024251246/pistol-fp-45

The interesting one yesterday was an interview with German military policeman Niklaus Lange, and his account of a resistance assassination of a Panzer officer using a Browning FP-45 Liberator, essentially a one-shot pistol dropped for the French Resistance's use. Lange (judging from the transcript) clearly was still suffering from PTSD, but it remains a fascinating account.

Bazookas, mortars and character figures

That's 36 bazooka teams assembled (once I'd found the boxes of left over bits of assault boat companies), 36 4-figure stands of LCVP passengers (found while I was looking for the former), 2 character figures (Capa and Costa) for the US, and 3 50mm mortar teams for the Germans undercoated.

Still pondering whether I'll paint/use them all, but at least they're undercoated, and I have two weeks (including a weekend where Anne's working) to get them to tabletop standard. I'm also out of PSC Field Grey and AP Uniform Grey sprays :D

More scenery fixes

Back to the Omaha beach boards, specifically the marsh boards, which weren't really up to snuff.

Lots of ghastly bubbles and rather shoddy groundwork. They
were, in my defence, among the first boards I ever made with
anything more complex than grass on it.

A combination of screwdriver and craft knife to scrape/gouge
out the water effect and some of the underlying foam and filler.

...and some fresh Pollyfilla...

I shall leave this to dry for a while and then
probably add some earth-toned texture paste to smooth it out.

That tricky 50mm mortar problem...

Two PSC 15mm Early War German sprue 'B' (yes, that's the one with the 50mm) purchased on eBay for a couple of quid each, and two Flames of War Light Mortar Team (Greatcoat) (GSO173) for equally little money, which gets me four 50mm mortars in total and a whole bunch of assorted figures in various degrees of ratty you're-last-on-the-upgrade-list uniforms as befits the Atlantic Wall.

Amusing note, on the page for the FoW team it says "by 1941 it clearly lacked the firepower and range to remain effective in a frontline role. Instead, existing models were relegated into service with auxiliary units where it remained in service until the end of the war."

Ok, Battlefront, so you're busy doing loads of D-Day stuff for FoW V4. Why no defence troops for the Atlantic Wall bundled so I don't have to buy entire platoons, then? Nice selection of MG gunners in Tobruks, 50mms and other odds and sods in a box, maybe? (Yes, I know I'm not using them for FoW... but I have bought over 500 of your figures for this game!)

Going to curl up with volume 2 of yesterday's audiobook later.

Background reading... well, listening...

Had a pleasant morning in bed yesterday (a lie in, yay) re-listening to "D-Day: Through German Eyes" on Audible. (And was gigging last night so didn't have time to post this).

Interesting book (and I must get on with part 2, too), based on 5 accounts recorded in the 50s. Fascinating to see how the perspective (obviously) differs from the much-more-often read Allied accounts. Well worth a look or listen.

More beach obstacles

Spent a bit of this evening (after finally catching up on the World Cup cricket final highlights) in Tinkercad, designing a beach ramp obstacle for Bloody Omaha for 3D printing.

Still haven't decided which way up to print it, and I may add manual supports rather than let my printer driver do it for me (for ease of removal), but it's looking OK.

In other news a PSC US heavy weapons sprue and a cheap box of plastic US infantry arrived so I can customise some figures from it. Still pondering the 50mm mortar problem - anyone got a box of PSC 15mm German Early War infantry they don't want?

Updates for Bloody Omaha, IABSM cards giveaway

Over lunch I edited a couple of new cards into one of my Artscow deck files, for the activation deck for Bloody Omaha (which may give you an interesting clue as to what's been changed), as well as added enough extra cards for the deck I already use to re-run the Ken Macksey "Battle!" scenario, should I ever want to, without sticking labels on cards.

I ran out of card ideas for me, so if anyone uses agentbalzac's Allied and Axis decks from Artscow, I will soon have a number of spare cards printed in that deck's design to handle more platoons (up to 12 a side) and armour (up to 6 a side), as well as a Turn End card and a few odds and sods. If you are such a person, you'd like those cards (pictured below except for the Tea Break card), and you come see me at Partizan, they're yours..

(note the background has always caused Artscow to complain)

“The Longest Day”

Ok - I was going to do some reading on the flight, but then I noticed Delta had “The Longest Day” as one of its movies, and it dawned on me that I haven’t actually watched it since I started paying attention to WW2 history.

Shot in black and white, despite being plenty recent enough (1962) for Technicolour, because the director wanted it ‘to look like WW2’, it features a fairly ridiculous cast of famous names, from John Wayne through Richard Todd to Robert Mitchum. Todd played Major Howard in the assault on Pegasus Bridge, having declined the option to play himself :D Several other cast members also took part in the D-Day landings.

What do I think?

It hasn’t aged brilliantly, but it’s markedly better than a lot of that era’s war films. The fight scenes are definitely of their time (compared to the gritty realism of Saving Private Ryan) with perhaps too many grenades and explosions and not enough MG34s, but it’s still an entertaining romp though the story of D-Day.

The "Bloody Omaha" boards in detail

Since I'm sure someone will ask, and I spent Tuesday finishing off the boards with our terrain-builder par excellence AndyM, I figure it's time for a few photos and some explanation of how it all went together.

The foam for the boards is from craftfoam.co.uk: mostly it's 50mm thick, 600mm square sheets, although a couple of boards are made of two layers of 25mm. Each is based on 3mm hardboard (to protect the corners), of which more later, and held on with No More Nails or (now) Loctite Power Grab (a US import!). The final board is 8'x6' and at one point three layers high.

Here's how they originally looked, bare of paint. The trenches were cut with either a router or a jigsaw (which is surprisingly easy, though I do recommend doing it outdoors AND wearing a dust mask). The edges were sloped using a mix of jigsaw and hot wire cutter, and then sanded (again, dust mask!). One of the tricks is that where slopes meet the edge of the boards, they're all at a point some multiple of 150mm from one end, and slope from 50mm to 0 in 150mm, which makes them at least semi-modular. (You've actually seen several of the boards in some of my Italy games (often hidden under a battle mat), as Sails of Glory coastline and as part of our Dambusters game!)

A mark I beach board.

Next step was undercoating with a pale brown household emulsion and applying lots of Javis Summer static grass. The four beach boards were sprayed with blue, then green,, then Rustoleum sand texture in bands from the seaward edge, and then the shingle bank added with ballast scatter and PVA on top of a bank made of lightweight filler.

2014-era boards

And that, with a few bits of clump foliage, is where the boards were for 2014's 70th anniversary of D-Day. In terms of sheer size, they looked pretty impressive, but they had a number of problems:

• We never painted the edges of the board, so any slight unevenness in the table they were set on looked awful as it showed every bit of bright, light blue foam.
• The cliffs on the beach boards were a rush job and really needed a repaint.
• It looked a bit like playing on a tennis court with outbreaks of moss.
• The earth colour for the trenches was way too pale.
• The $%^&*() beach boards, being basically done on 3mm hardboard, warped A LOT as the layers of paint dried. 

We tried several things to fix the warping, including painting the backs with PVA, to no avail. 

Come 2019 and the 75th anniversary, we decided it needed a bit of tarting up, not just for the above issues but because the boards had got a bit banged about.

In particular, over two evenings AndyM and I:

• completely rebuilt the beach boards on 9mm MDF. Same approach (blue then green then 

  

  Mark 2 beach board closeup.

   rown then Rustoleum textured paint in bands), and we managed to save the old cliffs, and cut them down so their height still matched the adjacent boards. The shingle bank is a mix of about four different grades and manufacturers of stone/sand basing materials.
• edged the boards with Santex Bitter Chocolate, that staple paint of terrain builders everywhere 
• repainted the inside of the trench works with artists burnt umber acrylic (although the Santex would have done just as well and is a pretty close match). 
• smudged/drybrushed the burnt umber on all the grass, then added some War World Scenics winter (parched) grass and clump foliage in patches
• some of the boards on the bottom layer are made from Javis grass sheet, and look even more tennis-court-like. I took sandpaper to them to remove some of the grass before adding the patches of burnt umber and WWS grass.
• added extra bright green grass to delineate the marsh area

2019 boards

And that is pretty much that. If I had time I'd fix the two or three underneath boards that don't quite match, and maybe make some of the patches of other grass and brown less 'patchy' :D 

Otherwise, pretty pleased with that.

Next up, figures, defences, basing, labels!

Club night - Salute run-through

Dan's first boat section turn up rather the worse for wear.
No leader, several destroyed weapon teams. But they
do have a medic.

Almost caught up :D

Took half the boards (the mostly tarted up half) to the club so Dan and Carl could have a refresher on Bloody Omaha.

Very useful - the part-completed table drew stares and favourable comments, and we tweaked a few rules, based on some notes from its last outing 5 years ago and a few more tweaks based on having actually read the rules recently ;D

If you're planning on dropping in at Salute, feel free to grab a boat section and see how you can do. Think the opening to "Saving Private Ryan"...

...and this is IABSM, so you can guarantee that will be reflected in the game. You may not win, you may not survive, but you may provide the platform that allows someone to get ashore and off the beach.

PSC D-Day anniversary sale

Book early to avoid disappointment. 25% off most products through midnight on Sunday.

Fine tuning "Bloody Omaha", 1940s Fest.

As you may recall, the club is taking our IABSM3 demo game "Bloody Omaha" to the "Festival of the 40's" in Pondersbridge (just SE of Peterborough) this weekend. If you're reading this, and feel like attending, it's a great weekend with loads of reenactment groups, evening entertainment etc. Adult admission is £6, kids under 16, veterans and current armed forces personnel get in free. And if you make yourself known to us as a reader of this blog, at the big 8'x6' D-Day table in the marquee, we'll even let you hang around and help try and survive the hell that is Omaha Beach.

After some feedback from the first couple of games, and a rewatch of the opening to 'Saving Private Ryan', we've fine tuned a few things, since in both the games we ran, the Americans pretty much didn't need wave 3 of the landing craft (G/16th RCT of the Big Red One), and they did seem to make it off the beach as far as the shingle a little easily. For those who took part at the club or Operation Market Larden 2, here are the changes:

• troops disembark off the LCVPs on their first activation, NOT when the LCVP arrives on table.
• while aboard they count as in hard cover (unless hit by HE, obviously), and they're packed in in the loading order according to the reference sources I have, which means that the 'front' squad will be the one taking most casualties from (say) MG fire.
• it costs 1 dice of movement to get down the ramp, and they disembark in loading order.
• I'm considering adding a rule that troops not off the LCVP at the 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em' (Tea Break) card will disembark pretty much in a dense target just off the loading ramp, since the LCVP crew just want the hell out of there.
• movement penalties:
• on the beach -1/dice
• in water -2/dice (the major change)
• flamethrower teams an extra -1/dice
• German MG and mortar positions can't be fired on by non-area-effect weapons until they're spotted
• I may add a German ammunition shortage card to the deck when wave 3 lands (several of the German MG34s actually stopped firing because they ran out of ammo and/or their barrels overheated to the point of being unusable).
• all assault sections now labelled on the back of their bases - bye-bye coloured PostIts.
• Medics are only on 2 of the 6 boats in a wave (5 or 6 on a d6, max of 2), and they act like level 3 Big Men who move on their section card (or at the Tea Break if they haven't), and can only remove shock.

We did a test run of the first wave (amid snarky remarks from Reuben, our secretary about why we needed an 8'x'6' table when we were just fighting in the first 18" of it :D) at the club last night (thanks to AndyM (as ever) and John), and it seems to work much better, and feel even more grittily realistic. One section that disembarked pretty much under the nose of Gefrieter Severloh's MG34 was for all practical purposes destroyed in about 3 runs through the activation deck, having piled up enough shock from the first round of fire (plus an MG bonus card) that several of its squads were finding movement nearly impossible, and to make matters worse it had no Big Man or medic. Another had to be chivvied off the LCVP by its Big Man, and the first bunch to reach the shingle were a scattered mess of three different sections.

Poor old AndyM is off to Omaha Beach for real on Thursday, which means he will once again miss a full 'production' run through of the game :D He is under orders to bring me back some photos, though.

Book review - "Spearheading D-Day" - Jonathan Gawne

Wow.

When I bought this on Amazon, I was expecting your usual trade paperback sized WW2 history book...


Not so's you'd notice. This is A4 or bigger, an inch and a half thick, and 288 pages absolutely chocka with photos and details.

It covers all the US special units that landed on D-Day, from the range of landing craft and ships used, through the positive arsenal of things that go boom that the engineers carried, to a look at the design and history of the assault vest. It also contains some useful organisation charts (for example, for the assault sections landing on Utah and Omaha) and a few painting guide notes that I'd have missed (did you know all US Navy personnel on the beaches or likely to end up on the beaches, such as LCVP crew, were required to have a grey band round their helmet, signifying "do not order this man inland off the beach"?).

Excellent book. If, like me, you're researching US forces for D-Day for any reason, treat yourself. And there are copies available from sellers on Amazon that give you change from £15, which is more than reasonable.

Bloody Omaha at Festival Of the Forties

We've been asked by the folks organising the Festival of the Forties here in Peterborough if we could bring our D-Day game :D

It looks like it'll be the Saturday, and possibly the Sunday. Watch this space for more details!