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Old March 13th, 2017, 12:24 PM

Griefbringer Griefbringer is offline
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Default Re: (Vers.10/2017) spob16,Unit 700 holding 1000lbs Bombs

With all the publicity that these thousand pounder Brandenburgers have got, I just had to go and try how they would actually work in a game...

First try: a dozen Brandenburger bomb teams hiding in bushes around objective hexes somewhere in Russia in 1942, with a couple of companies of KV tanks bearing in their direction. As the tanks got close up, the brave bomb teams started chucking their explosives - but to their great disappointment, most of the bombs did little more than scratch paint on the tanks. Luckily the Brandenburgers had also brought their trusty Sprengladungs, which managed to destroy around six tanks in total, with the bombs blowing up a few more with lucky hits, as well as immobilising a couple. But overall the Brandenburger teams would have better leaving the big bombs home and bringing instead more Sprengladung. Though against lighter tanks they might have done a lot better.

Second try: similar set-up as before, but instead of tanks several companies of penal infantry were sent to root out the Brandenburgers. This time the bombs proved quite destructive - whenever enemy infantry made it to neighbouring hex, a bomb chucked in their direction quickly drove them off in panic with numerous casualties. However, where terrain was not close enough, the enemy infantry could work to the flanks of the Brandenburgers and pour rifle fire from a few hexes away, with the Germans lacking any firearms to respond with. In a very close terrain the bomb teams might have been able to hold their own, but in this case they got largely flushed out from their positions.


On a more serious note, I do recall hearing stories of late war Japanese infantry using aeroplane bombs as infantry weapons. This involved digging a hole in the ground, placing a suitably large bomb inside, camouflaging the hole, and then having it manned by a poor infantryman with a hammer. In case of enemy (preferably a tank) reaching the location, the infantryman was supposed to hit the detonator with a hammer to trigger the explosion. In game terms, arrangements like this are probably best represented by immobile booby traps etc.
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