Here’s a quick AAR from Alex Sotheran taken from the IABSM Facebook Group.
As Alex says: “IABSM at the club tonight. Despite one British platoon commander not attending the 'O' Group they managed to push on to the German held crossroads and using a combination of smoke and manoeuvre threw them out at the point of a bayonet!”
Will Depusoy and friends have been converting the Kursk “Storming the Citadel” campaign to I Ain’t Been Shot Mum, but using Chain of Command activation and buying support “platoons” instead of single models.
Here’s a quick report from one game taken from the IABSM Facebook Group. Click on the picture below to see all.
Great After Action report from Dan Albrecht and friends, originally posted on the IABSM Facebook Group.
The battle recreated an engagement between 12th SS Panzer Division and the British 11th Armoured Division on June 27th near Caen. Order of Battle is from the excellent book Monty's Epsom by Skirmish Campaigns.
Click on the picture below to see all the action:
Quick After Action Report from the I Ain’t Been Shot Mum Facebook group: Des Darkin running a game using the dice-activated version of the rules.
US forces advancing towards Leipzig run into more than expected outside the village of Gross Glechin. Click on the picture below to see all:
Here’s a cracking After Action Report from Steve Blease from his Bleaseworld blog.
The Welsh Guards are trying to break through to Brussels, again. Click on the picture, below, to see all…
One of the games I played in at this year’s Operation Market Larden was a superbly presented I Ain’t Been Shot Mum scenario put on by Phil and Jenny.
Iaon and I would lead tanks from the Welsh Guards supported by motorised infantry from the Grenadier Guards in a race across Belgium to be the first units into Brussels. Historically, the only opposition encountered was in the town of Halle, and that’s what the day’s affairs would recreate. Our mission was to get a “significant force” off either of the bridges at the other end of the table.
Unfortunately, things did not go entirely to plan mainly, I hasten to add, due to a spectacular cock-up in tactics on my part!
Click on the picture below to see how easy it is to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
At Operation Market Larden 9 last Saturday, my morning game was a superb Race for Brussels game put on by Phil and Jenny.
The Dynamic Duo had playtested the game a few days before, and Steve Blease has written a lovely After Action Report that you can read by clicking on the picture below:
But how did you do at the game, I hear you ask?
Rest assured, I’ll be writing a full report concerning my execrable performance when I have time to do so but, put it this way, it was definitely an “interview without coffee” for my company commander when he limped back to base!
Great After Action Report from Elroy Davis showcasing a game set in Sicily, 1943.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Off to Dave’s for a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum versus a couple of novice players, Peter and Si. It’s May 1940 and I would play the French defending against a strong German advance.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Another beautiful game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum from Phil Turner, with help from Dee VonDoom, Steve Blease and Jenny Turner.
Highly recommended.
March this year saw the annual Herts of Lard Games Day in Rickmansworth.
Fellow Lardy Des Darkin brought along an Italian game played on some spectacular scenery. Click on the picture below to see all:
Following swiftly on from his last game, Phil Turner fought a beautiful looking game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum that featured action from the Welsh Guards’ campaign in Normandy in 1944.
Click on the picture below to see all: highly recommended!
I hope that everyone can be lucky enough to play in one of Phil Turner’s excellently presented and run games of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum. I did so at one of the Operation Market Larden events, and enjoyed myself immensely.
Here’s another game from Phil that uses one of the scenarios from the rulebook. Click on the picture below to see all…
Here are some pictures of game Alex Sotheran has been playing using the first scenario from the I Ain’t Been Shot Mum rulebook: North of Caen. These were posted in the IABSM Facebook group.
Great little AAR from Matt Clark featuring a solo historical game of IABSM that he recently played: C Company, 5th Wiltshires tackle Les Duane's farm in the opening stages of Operation Jupiter.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Tim Whitworth of Eagles and Lions Wargaming tested out a scenario for I Ain’t Been Shot Mum based on the battle for Gheel in Belgium in 1944.
Click on the picture below to see all…
Just before Christmas I had a chance to play a great game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum using the first scenario from the Blenneville or Bust! scenario pack: West of Pierrecourt.
The Allies are moving up the valley hoping to hook round Pierrecourt to the west. In order to do this, they need to be able to cross the Moire River. There’s a major bridge at Belle Maison, but Belle Maison is apparently full of Germans, so it would be good to find somewhere else to cross. Aerial assets have spotted a small bridge west of Pierrecourt, and the reconnaissance elements of the US 107th Infantry Division (nicknamed the Coyotes) have been sent forward to check it out.
The Germans, meanwhile, are keenly aware that the troops in Pierrecourt are relying on the Moire to protect their wider left flank. As the Allied advance begins, their commanders send out 30th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance units to cover as many river crossings as they can. This scenario covers the first clash between the opposing scouts.
Click on the picture below to see what happened:
Over the Christmas period, I got a chance to play in a Christmas-themed game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum set in late December 1944.
It was a Battle of the Bulge scenario, with me playing a US force defending a major supply dump against an attack from a German armoured column. I could expect some support from nearby Brits, but couldn’t be sure when they would arrive.
Click on the picture below to see what happened…
Earlier this year, I bought the Kasserine boxed set at a show, and having already completed the Panzers for the Germans, it was time to have a crack at the Americans.
In the box, you get enough plastic sprues for five M3 Stuarts, four M3 Lees, and three M4 Shermans. To these I added not two French hens and a partridge in a pear tree but some Battlefront special edition Sherman base I’d had lying around for ages. Let’s take them each in turn.
First up were the five Stuarts. The build did not get off to a great start when the first thing I did was to snap the gun barrel in half on the first Stuart I was building. I’ve often said that clipping the gun barrels from the sprue is often a risky business, and so it had proved again.
This was a real pain in the backside, but I solved it by using a decapitated pin instead. It’s the barrel on the command tank (the one with the chap sticking out the turret) in the picture above.
Otherwise, the build wasn’t too difficult, although getting the upper hull to sit flush on the main body proved almost impossible. That means that there’s a gap on both sides of most of the models, but I stuck the stowage on the side where it was worst and the paint job conceals the other.
As a point to note, these kits have no tolerance for badly clipped parts: you have to make sure there are absolutely no bumps or it just won’t fit together.
The same notes about gun barrels and no tolerance applies to these kits as well. Also, you need to make sure that you get the 75mm gun the right way up: get it right and you can fix it in place without glue so that it swivels.
Otherwise, these kits go together well, especially the mudguards: they were actually strangely satisfying to fit!
This is where the fun began…but “fun” entirely of my own doing!
It was quite an overcast day when I sprayed these in the garage and, as is my custom, I took the trays with all thirteen tanks out of my spraying area and put them on the front step just outside the front door of the house. It’s a place that’s in the sun and, once dry, I wouldn’t have to go through the rigmarole of walking to the garage (all of twelve steps!), opening the garage door, getting the models, closing the garage door etc.
I then went into the house and started watching a bit of TV, eventually dozing off as I’d had an early start.
The thunder and lightning of an enormous storm woke me, and for a while I sat watching the lightning fork down and the wind sweep the rain horizontally across the front garden.
Then I remembered my models: still outside “drying in the sun”!
By the time I rescued them, the trays with the Stuarts and Lees were half an inch deep in water, and the tray with the Shermans was nowhere to be seen! I eventually spotted it blown down the drive some twenty metres away!
Rushing out into the teeth of the storm, I managed to rescue the Stuarts and Lees without too much difficulty, and then went back out into the darkness to find the Shermans. We leave no-one behind!
I found all three Sherman hulls, but only one turret, so the models below have been built using the spare turrets from some Plastic Soldier Company Shermans that I’d built some time ago: like many plastic models, there’s one PSC sprue for a Sherman that allows you to build all the variants i.e. it has the parts for various shaped turrets on it dependent on which variant of Sherman you are building.
Okay, so the turrets don’t turn, and have no .50 cal…but that’s better than throwing the incomplete models away and they seem to have turned out okay.
Fortunately, the Battlefront special I was also painting was made of metal and resin, so was a pretty solid affair that hadn’t been blown away in the wind.
So that’s another foothill of the lead mountain dealt with.
The Battlefront Kasserine box set is good value (especially the discounted price I paid for it) and the kits aren’t really too hard to put together. Take a bit more care than I do and none of them should be a problem.
One thing: no decals are included in the set. I’d have rather paid a bit more and had the right decals than have to specially buy a pack or two of yellow stars for the US tanks, and I couldn’t find anyone who does 15mm yellow strips to go either side of the stars like on the pictures of the models on the box. I could have tried to paint them myself, but experience has shown me how difficult that is, so I didn’t bother to even try!
Looking back at my post about building and painting the Panzers (click here) I see that I gave the German side of the box set a Recommended. I can’t give the US side of things the same rating, mainly because of the build on the Stuarts and the overall lack of specialist decals: it gets a solid Average for being convenient and good value, but that’s all.
Great to get my early war French back onto the table again as Bevan and I played a scenario based on one element of the battle of Hannut: the assault on Crehen.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
Welcome to Vis Lardica, a not-for-profit website mostly dedicated to the company-sized wargaming rules produced by the TooFatLardies, but encompassing my other gaming interests as well.
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