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.
