IABSM AAR: Viking Panzers in Central Poland

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Another cracking I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum battle report from the pen and camera of Mark Luther.

It’s another 6mm battle fought at the Gigabyte’s cafe, and this time features a somewhat generic game based on actions to the east of Warsaw in August 1944 where the Soviets had sent masses of tanks through thin lines of the German defenders. The panzer units were then forced to scramble to cut those units off before they totally disrupted the front.

Click on the picture, below, to see all…

IABSM AAR: Anzio #10: Highway 7

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Another great 6mm I Ain't Been Shot Mum game from Mark Luther played at Gigabites Cafe in November 2021.

The scenario is taken from the Anzio: Wildcat to Whale scenario pack and features US infantry and armour assaulting a collection of four farmhouses held by men from the Herman Goering Panzer Division.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: 83rd Naval Brigade in the Caucasus 1942

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Another superb 6mm I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! after action report from Mark Luther.

This time Soviet Naval Infantry take on a German recce force in the north Caucasus in August 1942. The Germans were closing in on the port of Novorossiysk from the north and the Soviets had set up blocking positions before Verkhnebakanskiy. This represents the 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade's fallback spot. They were facing the 125th Infantry Division with some StuGs and armored cars.

Click on the picture below to see all…

IABSM AAR: Grudziadz

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Another great 6mm IABSM after action report from Mark Luther, this time featuring scenario eight from the September War Part One scenario pack (available from this website).

Played at Gigabites Cafe, Marietta, September 2021, the game involves the Germans attacking Grudziadz, a town in the Polish corridor in September 1939. The Germans thrust was from East Prussia i.e. they were actually attacking from the east.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Alt Langsow

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Here’s another great battle report from Mark Luther. The game was I Ain’t Been Shot Mum in 6mm played at the Gigabyte Cafe in September.

This was a pretty basic Soviet attack on the defensive line NE of Seelow , 16 April, 1945. Elements of the 26th Fallschirmjaeger Regiment were dug in forward/east of Alt Langsow and the 301st Rifle Division and 220th Tank Brigade were ordered to overrun them and head to Neu Langsow.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Somewhere in Flanders

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Another superb looking game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum! from Alan Curtis and friends.

Lead units of 7th Panzer supported by elements of Tottenkopf Division bump into a BEF company with attached anti-tank guns deployed to contest a river crossing somewhere in Flanders.

An amazing set-up that is well worth a browse. Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Prokhorovka

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Off to Dave’s for my first face to face game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum since before lockdown!

The scenario was set on the Eastern Front in 1943, and based on an historical encounter. Elements of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army (played by me) had to advance onto the table and take a village, Prokhorovka, defended by German armour. Yes, unusually for IABSM, this was to be an armour versus armour game with no infantry present.

I had what looked like an overwhelming force: a first wave of an HQ element, two platoons of three t-34s each, and a third platoon of three BT-17s. Following that, I had six more platoons of armour split into two more waves for a total of six more T-34s, three venerable KV-1s, three SU-76s, two SU-76is and, the piece de resistance, two SU-152 big beast tank killers.

If that’s what I had, I was a little nervous about what I was going to face. I’d been told to watch out for the new German Tiger tank: presumably I’d be facing about 20 of them!

Click on the picture below to see what happened:

The Wojtek Memorial, Edinburgh

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I was wandering around Princes Street Gardens, under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, the other day when I came across a memorial that I hadn’t previously been aware of: the Wojtek the Soldier Bear memorial.

From Wikipedia:

In the spring of 1942 the newly formed Anders' Army left the Soviet Union for Iran, accompanied by thousands of Polish civilians who had been deported to the Soviet Union following the 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland.

At a railroad station in Hamadan, Iran, on 8 April 1942, Polish soldiers encountered a young Iranian boy who had found a bear cub whose mother had been shot by hunters. One of the civilian refugees in their midst, eighteen-year-old Irena (Inka) Bokiewicz, the great-niece of General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, was very taken with the cub. She prompted Lieutenant Anatol Tarnowiecki to buy the young bear, which spent the next three months in a Polish refugee camp established near Tehran, principally under Irena's care.

In August, the bear was donated to the 2nd Transport Company, which later became the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, and he was named Wojtek by the soldiers. The name Wojtek is the nickname, diminutive form, or hypocorism of "Wojciech" (Happy Warrior), an old Slavic name still common in Poland.

Wojtek initially had problems swallowing and was fed condensed milk from an old vodka bottle. He was subsequently given fruit, marmalade, honey, and syrup, and was often rewarded with beer, which became his favourite drink. He later also enjoyed smoking (or eating) cigarettes, as well as drinking coffee in the mornings. He also would sleep with the other soldiers if they were ever cold in the night.

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He enjoyed wrestling with the soldiers and was taught to salute when greeted. He became an attraction for soldiers and civilians alike, and soon became an unofficial mascot to all the units stationed nearby. With the 22nd Company, he moved to Iraq, and then through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.

Wojtek copied the other soldiers, drinking beer, smoking and even marching alongside them on his hind legs because he saw them do so. Wojtek had his own caregiver, assigned to look after him. The cub grew up while on campaign, and by the time of the Battle of Monte Cassino he weighed 200 pounds (14 st; 91 kg).

From Egypt, the Polish II Corps was reassigned to fight alongside the British Eighth Army in the Italian campaign. Regulations for the British transport ship, which was to carry them to Italy, forbade mascot and pet animals. To get around this restriction, Wojtek was officially drafted into the Polish Army as a private and listed among the soldiers of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. Henryk Zacharewicz and Dymitr Szawlugo were assigned as his caretakers.

As an enlisted soldier with his own paybook, rank, and serial number, he lived with the other men in tents or in a special wooden crate, which was transported by truck. During the Battle of Monte Cassino, Wojtek helped his unit to convey ammunition by carrying 100-pound (45 kg) crates of 25-pound artillery shells, never dropping any of them.

From my 1939 September War Polish army: presumably a Wojtek predecessor!

From my 1939 September War Polish army: presumably a Wojtek predecessor!

While this story generated controversy over its accuracy, at least one account exists of a British soldier recalling seeing a bear carrying crates of ammo. The bear mimicked the soldiers: when he saw the men lifting crates, he copied them. Wojtek carried boxes that normally required 4 men, which he would stack onto a truck or other ammunition boxes. This service at Monte Cassino earned him promotion to the rank of corporal. In recognition of Wojtek's popularity, a depiction of a bear carrying an artillery shell was adopted as the official emblem of the 22nd Company.

Post War

After the end of World War II in 1945, Wojtek was transported to Berwickshire, Scotland, with the rest of the 22nd Company. They were stationed at Winfield Airfield on Sunwick Farm, near the village of Hutton, Scottish Borders. Wojtek soon became popular among local civilians and the press, and the Polish-Scottish Association made him an honorary member.

Following demobilisation on 15 November 1947, Wojtek was given to Edinburgh Zoo, where he spent the rest of his life, often visited by journalists and former Polish soldiers, some of whom tossed cigarettes for him to eat, as he did during his time in the army. Media attention contributed to Wojtek's popularity. He was a frequent guest on BBC television's Blue Peter programme for children.[

Wojtek died in December 1963, at the age of 21, weighing nearly 500 kilograms (1,100 lb), and was over 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) tall.

The Wojtek Memorial

The statue was commissioned by the Wojtek Memorial Trust: a Scottish Charity established in 2009 to celebrate the life of Wojtek, "the Soldier Bear", the lives of those who knew him, and their stories during and after the Second World War. The Trust also aims to promote wider understanding of the many historic and current links between the peoples of Poland and Scotland.

The memorial is a life and a quarter bronze statue of a Polish soldier with Wojtek, and a 4m low relief pictorial panel set on a granite platform. It was sculpted by Alan Beattie Herriot and the cast in Edinburgh by Powderhall Bronze. Its setting was designed by Raymond Muszynski of Morris & Steedman Associates.

AAR: Virtual Lard V

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One of the few good things to come out of lockdown has been how people have found ways of gaming remotely.

The Virtual Lard Games Days are an excellent example of this. Using the Lardy Discord server to co-ordinate, vast numbers of games run simultaneously all around the world, with a virtual pub also available for those all-important post-game discussions. The Virtual Lards are, in effect, online conventions.

Virtual Lard V took place last weekend, and I was lucky enough to get a place on two games: one in the morning and one in the afternoon (this isn’t guaranteed: the sessions are often over-subscribed).

Sharpe Practice in the AM

The morning’s session was a terrific game of Sharp Practice Napoleonics with Col Murray running a session that involved the French (commanded by the two Bobs: Lucky Bob C and myself) attempting to stop some Austrians (commanded by Andrew and Grizzlymc) making away with some items that had best remain nameless.

I won’t detail the step-by-step action, but suffice to say that my masterful mismanagement of the French Grenadiers kept a large proportion of the Austrians so busy shooting them to bits that the rest of our force (Bob’s Line and my Skirmishers) were able to drive the rest of the enemy off the table, so reducing their Force Morale to zero and giving us the game.

It was very exciting. At one stage it looked like being a certain Austrian victory as their Dragoons headed off-table with “the items”…but their movement rolls were poor, giving Bob and I (well, mainly Bob) time to hammer the Hungarians with musket fire again and again until they broke and fled. The last turn could have gone either way, but the draw of the cards, for once, favoured the French, and victory was ours.

Here are some pictures:

As an afterthought, one of the amusing things about Virtual Lard is the way that it brings people from different time zones together. Grizzlymc was actually in Sydney, Australia, and sipping whisky at what, for us, was early morning!

IABSM in PM

My afternoon game was I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum!, with Jim Catchpole running a scenario set in France in 1944. Dan Albrecht and I were commanding a company of British infantry moving forward to clear a village that may or may not have been in German hands. A pleasant chap called Michael was playing the Germans: he hadn’t played IABSM before.

All went well for the British until we hit a major chokepoint: a bridge that proved to be the single crossing point over a fast-flowing river right outside the village in question.

We began by doing everything right: probing over the bridge with out recon carriers, laying down smoke to cover a German MMG, but then the cards turned against us and the German artillery came hammering down.

An abortive attempt to break out of our “beachhead” by the carriers failed dismally (my fault entirely, Dan!) and then we just couldn’t get out of the artillery kill zone. If we moved forward, the waiting Germans shot us; if we stayed where we were we got hit by shells from above.

We lasted a couple of turns then ordered a retreat!

It was a difficult scenario, but we could have done a whole lot better. Which was a pity, as our leapfrogging advance to the bridge was a speedy thing of beauty! What we should then have done was to take the time to spot properly, lay down smoke properly etc but the arrival of the German artillery mucked up our plans.

Well played Michael, well umpired Jim, and I think Dan and I both agreed that our solution was to pull back and call in the artillery. Or, to put it another way: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit...it's the only way to be sure!

Here a few shots of the game right up to the point where the German artillery arrived:

Afterword

All in all, another great Virtual Lard. My thanks to the organisers and game-runners, and can’t wait until the next one.

IABSM AAR: Les Attaques

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Another absolutely beautiful battle report, this time featuring a game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum played using the first scenario from the Defence of Calais scenario pack.

The report was originally posted on the IABSM FB group, which you can access by clicking here.

It’s May 1940, and with British troops being evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk, the ancient port of Calais stood on the critical western flank of the Anglo-French lines.

In a desperate bid to shore up the flank Churchill committed the British 30th Infantry Brigade to defend Calais to the last. What ensued was an heroic struggle that is writ large in the annals of British military history.

This first scenario features men from the Searchlight Battalion, supported by anti-tank guns, trying to hold off the leading elements of the German advance. Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Le Bleu Ferme

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Absolutely brilliant After Action Report from Des Darkin, taken from the IABSM Facebook Group, featuring action in France in June 1944 as a British attack tries to push some Germans back. The game was played using the IABCYM dice-driven variant of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum.

Played and reported in four sessions, this AAR combines Des’ various FB posts into one document with loads of great pictures: recommended reading.

Click on the picture below to see all: