The Commander Series Forum

The counterattack of the HG- Division at Gela was stopped by naval gunfire.
About 40 tanks killed this way. Four by USS destroyer "Laub".

Can you play this situation using BKCII rules?

Naval fire called in by AOs would hit with a 6?

I think that you can´t stop a tankattack in this way!

Any suggestions?

Cheers Kalle

Naval gunfire provides 12 dice per base in the target area.
On average 2 hits, one in 3 units hit suppressed.

So not likely but will cause a real mess amongst the supporting infantry!

It is one of the reason we now slowly reduce hits rather than remove them at the end of the turn. Instead of removing all hits at the turn's end, we remove 1 or 2 (haven't settled on the right balance yet) and no unit can remove that final hit.

I think 40 tanks is an exaggeration. HG lost 53 tanks out of 85 during the entire Sicilian campaign. (Figures do not include the 17 Tigers attached from 506.) This make a loss of 40 in a single action unlikely IMHO. Having said that the fire of the USS Boise is often cited as critical in these early actions. The NGF probably won't stop the attack alone but as Adrian stated it will affect the infantry (which is one of the things that happened) allowing the US player to concentrate AT assets on the armour which no doubt will be somewhat disorganised.

I just read in "Breakout from Juno" by Mark Zeuhlke about a tank unit that was being heavily counter-attacked by the Germans as part of Operation Totalize. It got to the desperate point where the unit called artillery down on their own position. The unit was expecting fire from 25lbers, which represented no threat to the tanks. What they got was a shelling by medium 4.5" and 5.5" guns. According to the book, this alarmed the unit because these shells were capable of killing tanks.

I'd imagine that the even bigger guns of a cruiser would be more than capable of killing tanks. I'd also say that 40 tanks is unlikely, but maybe that figure lumps in armoured halftracks and armoured cars as "tanks".

There is a similar comment in 'Operation Bluecoat Over the Battlefield' re medium regiments being needed against tanks which I read only yesterday.

You can find some info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gela_(19...

The 40 destroyed tanks may include italian equipment?

According to my indepth research (a brief skim of wiki) the naval gunfire *murdered* the infantry and degraded the tanks, but theres evidence to suggest most of the actual tank kills were done by the four Shermans they got ashore before Axis air attacks closed the beach to the LSTs.

Probably hard to dodge incoming AP when you're being slammed around by all the HE in the world!

"The 40 destroyed tanks may include italian equipment?"

Possibly, USS Boise also helped to counter the attack by Mobile Gruppe E which included a company of R-35 tanks.

My money is always on the ships, until you pull out the plug and bath time is over.

..or flush the toilet on a U-Boat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U...

German over engineering at it's best!

That's impressive