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Invasion! by John Curry
Offside report by David Bradbury
This game, put on by John Curry at the West of England CALF, aims to look at the planning phase of an amphibious operation, something often left out by wargamers who jump straight into the execution phase. Of course, the only way to tell if the plan is very good is to implement it, so the planning phase was followed by a play through using the Megablitz system.
The premise of the game is that the Normandy landings having stalled amid the bocage, the top brass decree a new landing in division strength on the west coast of France south of Bordeaux to demonstrate to the Germans that they cannot afford to strip the garrisons of other coastal areas. A key component of the plan is the seizure intact of the only coastal port in the area with dock facilities large enough to handle a division’s supply needs. So secret is the plan is that this location can only be known by its codename “Teignbridge” (which presumably suggested itself to GHQ planners by its remarkable similarity to the harbour in Devon of the same name. The players have to accomplish this task with two infantry battalions, eight troops of tanks, one company each of commandos and paratroops and artillery support. The main complication was a general lack of good beaches, coupled with the fact that the port was inland on a river estuary, separated from the sea by a narrow curving approach dominated by heights opposite. The sea beach opposite the town was clearly seen in the aerial photos to be covered with anti-landing obstacles. Needless to say, there were insufficient landing craft to get us in all in one lift. The players took the various roles - Bob Cordery commanding, while it fell to me to lead the first infantry battalion in.
The planning phase started with intelligence gathering. In the end we did manage to pull together a reasonable amount of data from maps, aerial photo reconnaissance, tide tables, a sketch map requested from the Resistance and the results of clandestine reconnaissance by submarine. Of course, all this interest in the area raised the risk of the Germans realising what we were up to. This was interleaved with the gradual evolution of a plan - which eventually crystallised as a coup de main, on the grounds that the other suitable sites seemed just too far away. We would use a coastal steamer disguised as a German one to lift in two of my companies to seize the wharves, the German guns commanding this approach on the headland having first been silenced by the commandos. Meanwhile the Paras would drop outside the town to secure the main likely route of German counterattack.
In the event the plan did survive contact with the enemy, but only just. A key omission was to reconnoitre whether the cliffs of the headland opposite the estuary were climbable even by commandos - it turned out they weren’t. The commandos were pinned down on the beach. As a result the guns were able to inflict rather heavy losses on my coup de main force as it sailed upriver. Nevertheless it succeeded in fighting its way through the town against surprised defenders, who weren’t positioned to repel the threat from the direction in which it came. The beach was secured from behind by these forces in the nick of time to allow our leading element of tanks to link up with up with the Paras to throw back the German counterattack. The main blight on the operation, apart from the heavy casualties incurred, was an unfortunate “blue-on-blue”: we had decided not to ask for support on the day from the Resistance, for fear of a security leak, but it seemed that SOE decided it would be a good idea to have them muster anyway, and the Paras (rightly) decided to shoot first and ask questions later when they found unidentified armed men blocking their route of march.
As a game it was most enjoyable, indeed the best session I played during the whole weekend. More than that, it did succeed in throwing considerable light on parts of military operations that wargamers don’t usually reach. I remember saying to John at one point after our fruitless search for good beaches with clear access inland that I began to appreciate why the planners at Arnhem decided to drop so far from the bridge - and if a game starts to give that one those sorts of insight, then it has clearly achieved something.