Panzer in the sand - Fow AAR

Last week Tobias and I had another midwar battle in Flames of war.

 

We played a small 1000pts battle, and I wanted to try out what the Panzer IV was capable of.

At a mere 1000pts you don´t get that many Panzer IV Im afraid but I thought it could atleast give me a taste of them.

So with a rather special list I was ready to tackle the American troops.

The game started with my force on the table and half his force waiting as reserves. With only the enemy infantry on the table I felt pretty strong.

With full speed my recon armored cars managed to quickly take a closer look at the objective.

But it was a fools idea to try to capture the objective with a small fragile unit and the enemy infantry in their halftracks was on them in seconds and easily wiped them out.

Meanwhile my Panzer IV bombards the enemy infantry from save distance.

The enemy reserve enters the table, a small unit of the dreaded Sherman tank. They set one Panzer IV ablaze on their arrival.

My plan now was to regroup, make a sort of firing line and just shoot them to pieces. With this much firepower they will surly die.

The result was one Sherman destroyed, one bailed out and the last one kept his nerves and defiantly stayed on the battlefield.

Next round another Sherman platoon arrived and a sort of standstill happened.

Both my mixed Panzer IV tanks and his Shermans traded shoots against each other. But with mostly short barreled infantry support variants of Panzer IV I had real problem to pierce his armor and the firefight ended with lots of burning Panzer IV before my troops had enough and pulled back.

Darn it.. At first I really thought I had him.
My gamle with my armoured cars was a bad idea but I really wanted to see how far they could go,

Upon the arrival of the first enemy platoon that resulted in just on burning Panzer IV my shooting line with all my remaining tanks looked really good. But the dices didn´t match my plan. I just couldn´t pierce those tanks.
And then later with the arrival of another Sherman platoon I was starting to sweat.

So lessons from this match is that even doe the early Panzer IV with short barrel is a cool looking tank its in no way a good idea to engage a Sherman on equal terms. They was rather good at bombarding infantry so I guess they behaved as they should do historical.

Thanks for looking.