The Commander Series Forum

My first posting. I thought I had to share this.
Last week our opponents (you know who you are) deployed three Tigers in their defence.
I won’t go into detail of the terrain, suffice to say a river stopped a direct attack on the objective other than across a bridge (guarded by a Tiger and infantry) and the only other route was down our left side.
We decided to avoid the Tigers as much as possible. Using a deep left flank attack we moved a group of Shermans behind the first lurking at the edge of a wood (got them on with a double 1) and left our first infantry battalion moving up our left flank to keep that Tiger and it’s supporting infantry occupied. The Shermans headed towards the objective where the plan was they would support our second infantry battalion approaching the objective across the bridge. Another Tiger lurked on route that we couldn’t avoid – it opened fire. At that point the “Tiger” was revealed to be a Panzer IV!
It turned out the one at the woods was also a Panzer IV and the third guarding the bridge was only a dummy after all. Our opponent’s excuse for this outrageous behaviour was that Americans thought all tanks were Tigers until proven otherwise. Of course we should have known that three Tigers would have cost too many points, but that’s another excuse.

Not a bad ruse, but some forewarning might have been nice! Makes good use of anecdotal information as well

Well next time you could deploy all 75mm shermans and then replace them with 76mm when you need to!!

Of course if they had encounter 3 Tigers, then lots of Close Air Support would have shortly arrived, and blown everything up!

I commanded the "Tigers" and should point out this was a scenario game (which I did not write!).

I thought it might have been a give away that the dummy Tiger didn't move for the entire game, even when the Shermans were starting to outflank it. Not that we needed Tigers, a combination of panzerfausts and surpressing American artillery screwed up the Shermans nicely

The next game perhaps we will field 3 or 4 "88's".
Graham

And the 88's will actually be PaK 36/7

IanS

I use this ruse all the time for games I put on down the club.

Then, to wind up the brit's who thought they'd end up facing a stug or pzIV one game, I brought on a panther and a tiger.

That keeps them a little honest!

Good grief, you’re all at it – is there no honour?
Anyway, I hope that’s the last time I get pushed the long way round by a couple of Panzer IVs.
If you are using one unit to represent another, do you pay the points for a Dummy in addition to the actual unit?

A skirmish set of world war two rules that I play at my club actually states that all German tanks are Tigers until correctly identified. Had a great laugh when I had a panzer II that was misidentitified for the whole game..

Just drove it about the battlefield and everybody ran away from it. Easiest win I ever had!!

Gerry