Cold War 82 - Identifying the Soviet attack avenues

 BAOR Brigade HQ - 05:30hrs 6th June 1982

"We are definitely in to a shooting war Gentlemen.  Warsaw Pact armoured formations have crossed the internal border at multiple points and large scale air raids are hitting our airfields and port facilities as we speak.  Battle Group Bravo fought an engagement over the last hour with what they are tentatively identifying as lead elements of 2nd Guards Tank Army around Ingelund.  They have badly hurt the Russian advance guard but are now withdrawing to the west to avoid being outflanked."

"We have two other Russian axis of advance within the Brigade area to contain but we have no positive contacts with them as yet and I have some concerns that they may have bypassed our recon formations.  We will know more once the AAC helicopter recon flights report in.  For the moment our trip wire units are pulling back to pre-planned defensive positions where they will make a further defensive stand.”

Soviet command post 1st Division, 2nd Guards Tank Army

"We have pushed the British back around 7Km all along our main axis of attack.  Our third tank regiment has dislodged heavy armoured formations at the cost of two battalions having to reform their units which will prevent them from following up immediately.  This is of little concern as the Regiment’s remaining two tank battalions have closed up and they will launch a regimental scale attack as soon as their lead battalions are ready to engage.  Lead elements of 2nd Tank Regiment are reporting contact with a British Reconnaissance screen.  1st TR advance guard has not made contact with the enemy yet."

In game terms the BAOR units are mostly withdrawing one table west to cover the crossings over the first river line.  Soviet 3rd TR faces an hour’s delay while it regroups the advance guard which was roughed up at Ingelund.  This has allowed it’s second echelon to close up.

If you look at the game map below Soviet units are orange circles and BAOR yellow rectangles (they show up better if you open the image up and zoom in).  The markers show which tables they occupy but not the exact locations on those tables.

The situation at around 0530 hrs 6 June 1982

There is a situation developing in the far north of the brigade area where one river crossing is unguarded.  BAOR needs to redeploy units northwards across the entire front line to balance out defensive duties.  Remember the BAOR battle groups are pairs of companies/squadrons and the recon units (noted with an R prefix) are troops with attached specialist units, while the Soviets are pairs of battalions so things are not as clear cut as they appear.

The turn process is to move the BAOR formations then the Warsaw Pact ones.  There is no fixed turn length, instead I set a time based either on the end of the last engagement and any regroup time and see how the other units have moved during that time.  Once I had moved the Soviet units, using a semi random system, I diced for air superiority for the next set of encounters and got a pretty substantial pro-NATO result so Soviet air support may be 'delayed'.  The next fight will be to try to extricate the BAOR Recon formation from table D8.

I'm beginning to wish I had used an actual set of locations from the BAOR area of operations rather than fictionalising things, mainly because I wouldn't have to try to invent names for places!  Lesson learned for next time!

Meanwhile back in the real world, I'm healing well following my surgery but still can't lift or carry anything over 5Kg in weight or stand for more than 15 minutes at a time.  The surgical scars are healing well and I'm not in any real pain more a general discomfort where my chest was cracked open!  All of which prevents me from setting up the large table required for the cold war games for a while yet.  It's probably going to be a couple or three weeks before the next game is played.