ehzorg
Posts: 69
Joined: 5/11/2010 Status: offline
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First, let me apologize to anyone with a modem or slow broadband for the size of this image (about 5M). This shows the movement of forces on the Eastern front during the first summer of the war, June - Oct 1941. You will notice that both the German player (DRommel) and the Soviet player (myself) have stacked the Northern front with what appears to be our strongest forces. Initially, I moved the entire Red army artillery and air forces up to Leningrad. My intention being to get them as far from the German border as possible, while still keeping their power points within the 4 hex radius needed to maintain "forward deployment". My plan was to achieve local firepower supremacy against Finland and hopefully knock it out of the war early. Elsewhere I tried to blow as many bridges as possible with roving engineers and position anything worth keeping (HQs, heavy equipment) near escape routes across major rivers. Barbarossa began with a strong thrust by the Wehrmacht toward Rostov, supported by amphibious and airborne landings around Talinin on the Baltic and Minsk to the center. I had hoped to hold Riga and the Daugava river defenses for at least a couple turns, but DRommel would have none of that. Riga fell on the second turn after being cut-off from behind and pummeled by artillery. After that it was a mad dash back toward Leningrad and Novgorod, hoping to cripple the Finnish in time to redeploy my artillery before Leningrad was cut-off. By sheer luck I was able to blow one key bridge to the SE of Pskov which may have given me an additional turn to setup defenses near Leningrad. German AGs Center and South made rapid progress to the Dneiper, and were held up just long enough by blown bridges and the Odessa defense to allow the bulk of my forces to retreat toward Moscow and the Caucuses. I've had no choice but to give ground here, having moved most my support to the North. The German advanced continued rapidly through the Ukraine and up to the Don & Volga. By September and October we were already fighting in the outskirts of Moscow, and Voronezh, Rostov are both in German hands. Luckily the snows came a bit early this year - November is cold...
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