Wargaming yesterday - early start to get to Schloss Goya for 10am kick-off. My idea that it would be amusing to arrive with fresh custard tarts was stillborn, since I couldn't obtain any. No matter, in fact, since our host laid on the customary excellent food and refreshments.
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| View over the battlefield, early on, from behind the Austrian left flank |
Our game was the
Commands & Colors: Napoleonics official scenario for Day 1 of the Battle of Aspern-Essling, which I guess is just the Battle of Aspern, when Massena attempted to hang on to the town, waiting for the bulk of Napoleon's army to hurry up and cross the Danube; thus the French have IV Corps plus some of the reserve cavalry. Lannes and all that stuff belongs to the second day. One big advantage of Day 1 is that it is small enough to make a good-sized game, though the number of built-up areas promised to give the beta-test
Ramekin rules
[I'm up to version 1.7] a decent workout and sanity-check.
I was Massena, while Goya and Stryker shared the Austrian forces, their overall commander being Archduke Charles. I took along my own French troops, and the Austrian forces were Goya's. We followed the published scenario very closely - the only (insignificant) amendment was that we replaced the mystery French "Guard Heavy Cavalry" unit with a third Cuirassier regiment - it has been suggested to me that whoever designed the scenario identified the Carabiniers as a guard unit - no matter.
Because we stuck to the published set-up, my artillery was mostly stuck in the wrong places. What I should have done was get busy right away with the double-moves which Ramekin allows, to get my artillery better placed. Didn't happen, of course, because I was immediately up to my neck in muck and bullets as the Kaiserliks set about the village.
The big Austrian line units have a scary amount of firepower, and they performed well - their only disadvantages are that they are slow, and are not allowed double moves, though they can certainly get a shift on when they are retiring, since they get double retreats for the
C&CN flag symbol rolls. Their distinctive
battaillon-masse tactic also proved to be a major discouragement to my late cavalry attack - without horse artillery (or aerial support) there was not much I could do against them.
The Austrians made excellent use, throughout, of the Combined Arms Attack rule, using artillery (including one particularly effective Grand Battery on the little hill north of the village) very effectively to support infantry attacks on the various bits of the town. I took heavy casualties very quickly, and was steadily pushed out of the town - I hung on to the extreme east end of the place, and I held the church for a while, until, again, the Austrians brought up a foot battery and blew me out of there.
So the French were very quickly well behind on Victory Points, including extra ones for possession of the majority of the town, and I only made the margin of defeat anything like respectable with a grand charge of cavalry (historically authentic, by the way) which took out the pesky Grand Battery and wrecked the Austrian cavalry. With everyone beginning to show signs of fatigue, Bellegarde's troops eventually claimed the necessary 12th VP, and the French were beaten
[but only until the following day!].
Yes, it was pretty decisive. Once again, my sincere thanks to my colleagues/opponents for their company and good humour, and to Goya for all his hard work organising and setting up, and for slaving in the galley.
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| Austrian High Command caught in the act of setting up the Grand Battery on the ridge. On the left edge of the photo is visible Massena [that's me] in a rather snazzy little [S-Range] carriage - yes, that's only correct for Wagram, but the thing would never get a run out at all if it weren't for a little historical licence... |
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| Already some casualties, but the Archduke isn't hanging about here |
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| The French left was protected by the church and some woods, and some impassable marshes. I put some crack light infantry in there - the boys in the church seem to have lit enough candles to hold out for a while, but the fellows in the wood were shot to bits very quickly |
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| Grenzer troops and Jaegers - good shooting... |
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| Discouraged French troops falling back after being routed from the first bit of the town; the strange circular base is my version of one of C&CN's new-fangled "Garrison Counters" which we re-named "Detachments" since it seemed more appropriate. These are a useful little addition to the game, and I might say some more about these some time. Yesterday we used unpainted MDF, with the soldiers attached with BluTack, but they are to be smartened up a bit. They are a most excellent way of finding a job for some of your substandard figures - give me your battle-worn, your bayonetless, your OOP misfits, your oddments from the Spares Box, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... |
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| Austrians well-established in Aspern |
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| French cavalry getting moving on the right flank |
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| General Legrand brings up some fresh troops from his division (not easy to find) to try to take back part of the village; they failed, and he himself became a casualty in the attempt |
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| Massena still hasn't moved, but he can see that the village is a lost cause - he gets the cavalry advancing on his right flank (far right of the table) |
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| Looking from the Austrian right, round about the same stage of the battle |
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| D'Espagne mops up the rest of the Grand Battery (half of it has already gone) with the 2nd Cuirassiers. Archduke Charles looks a bit close to the action in the background. Note the impressive row of white VP counters... |
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| But the heavy cavalry had no answer to the battaillon-masse tactics of the Austrian line infantry, so concentrated their attention on the cavalry - this went far better... |
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| As D'Espagne's French cuirassiers attack the mounted Austrians, Marulaz brings up the French light cavalry to attack the uhlans on the hill |
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| Some things can just be relied on - like death and taxes, the 15eme Chasseurs are always around somewhere |
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| The battle is more or less lost, but Molitor attempts to take back part of the village - borrowing the successful Austrian tactic of supporting the infantry with artillery in a Combined Arms attack |
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| Situation at the end - the French cavalry have pulled back to avoid the fire of the Austrian infantry. Massena is running out of friends, but he knows Lannes is coming to sort things out tomorrow! |
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| Special mention - Goya's new Landwehr unit are plastic (gasp) - very nice too - they did well. Goya is reluctant to spend too much on figures for the Landwehr or militia, since he is uneasy about making much of an effort to arm the masses. |
***** Late Edit *****
Since the only reaction to this
post thus far today has been a couple of emails which indicated that at
least two of my readers are confused, I must offer my apologies for a
very poor bit of editorial work here. Having thought further about the
matter, I confess that I am now a bit confused myself.
To
clarify: this is not a description of the first day of a 2-day wargame
(I wish it was!), it is a description of a wargame based on the first
day of Aspern-Essling, which was a real battle which lasted two days,
and my suggestion here that the French might go on to win after two days
is not based on history, it merely expresses the French commander's
expectation after wargaming the first day's action. After all, the
French would probably not have chosen to fight on if they had expected
to lose, I guess.
Which brings me to the second point. Was
Essling actually a French defeat? I have always believed it to be so -
famously so, in fact. Yet Prof De Vries points out (correctly) that
Essling was a battle-honour on French Napoleonic battle flags - the 1812
issue of flags showed this honour for a great many regiments. The
Professor reckons that the French (like everyone else, he says) only
awarded battle honours for victories - the later example of La Moskowa
(Borodino) being explained since the French regard it as a victory.
Thus, says he, Essling must be another disputed result.
I
confess I have always been sort of aware of this apparent paradox, but
had managed to avoid thinking it through. I did a quick bit of reading today,
and it seems that battle honours were awarded to regiments which
performed well at battles commanded by Napoleon himself (which is why
you will not find Tarragona, for example). The small matter of whether
or not he won was not normally an issue, as we know.
All
fine - looks like I learned something I should already have known, and
if it turns out that the Professor is mistaken (an event rarer than a
Napoleonic defeat) then that is indeed icing on the cake.
*******************
Enjoyable battle report, Tony! D'Espagne did a good job in his futile attempt to stem the White Menace. Do you suppose the carabiniers were rated as GHC to give them a little more resolve rather than simply a gross error?
ReplyDeleteWith little care for the raising of militia and landwehr, I am somewhat surprised they choose to fight for Goya at all!
Thanks Jon - GHC rating - possibly. Cuirassiers are contentiously unstoppable in our games anyway, so nothing much was lost!
DeleteI am (understandably?) nervous about expressing any disapproval of the policies of an Autocracy when they feed me so well...
I had the same thought; perhaps the author of the scenario intentionally rated the 1st/2nd Carabiniers as Guard; some feel they were the creme de la creme of the French Heavy cavalry... including, it seems, the Carabiniers themselves! Or perhaps the enemy and/or author were confused by their uniforms, which were still very similar to those of the Grenadiers a Cheval. That would of course, famously change in 1810 to the white jackets faced sky blue, with the romanesque helmets and copper plated cuirasses...
ReplyDeleteI think the GHC classification, as you suggest, may be deliberate. Our house rules for cuirassiers are a bit OTT at the moment - cuirassiers have become Tiger tanks, so some changes are afoot!
DeleteA really enjoyable game - I think you have almost got the 'perfect' set of rules to fight big battles in one day! Plastic troops should however roll one dice less on all occasions...
ReplyDeleteHi Ian - I am still trying to arrange therapy for having had plastics on the table at all. I think we agreed, plastics which do not have masses of flash and which do not shed paint when you look at them are not proper OS plastics at all (though I understand that the Spencer Smith SYW figures in the Old Testament books were mostly plastics - how did that work? - proper OS deployment of singly-based soldiers required great handfuls of figures to be heaved about the place - aaargh!).
DeleteGreat looking game and a most entertaining report, thanks.
ReplyDeleteThanks James - very much. Good to hear from you.
DeleteA great looking game and a very enjoyable report Tony...
ReplyDeleteDo not fear the plastic... I have nothing against it personally but I do prefer good old lead.
When one looses one’s ‘rag’ at a particularly irritating opponent... a handful of plastic cuirassiers thrown at them will have little or no effect... however a block of old school heavy metal will most likely cause much despair and possibly bruising.
All the best. Aly
I don't really have a prejudice against plastics, I guess - it's just become a traditional jokey stance to assume. My experiences with plastics were all Airfix, a great many years ago - mostly to cover for the difficulty of obtaining metal figures. Some of them tided me over nicely for years (and it took a long time, for example, to replace my Airfix RHA after I had eventually sold them on Ebay). The problems I had with plastic troops were always to do with the difficulty of getting them to retain paint, and the effort it took to trim flash off the mouldings before painting - I was always short of eyesight and patience - and skill, of course. Particularly in the area of senior commanders, I am regularly tempted by modern plastic ranges - very impressive and attractive. I even have a few boxes in the cupboard, just in case.
DeleteI do have some odd plastic figures in my armies - notably HaT British LI buglers (otherwise hard to find in 20mm) and one particular old mounted Airfix French colonel whom I retained as a token memorial to a complete brigade of French Airfix French I had in my original Napoleonic armies (complete with plasticine-and-banana-oil epaulettes for the flank companies). If I remember correctly, he's in the 2nd Bn of the 27eme Ligne.
Enjoyed, thanks, one of my fave battles ........ for apparently no real reason that I can discern, rather like Marengo and a handful of others.
ReplyDeleteHi Norm - good to hear from you. I've been reading about the Danube campaign for donkeys' years. but only recently got involved in any wargames for it - this is all pretty new to me, and very interesting. Goya himself has visited both Essling and Aspern, and was able to tell us which of the buildings he has actually been in - that's pretty cool, though the defence of the Opel car-factory car park is not covered in JH Gill's books in any detail.
DeleteAspern Day 1 certainly has a terrifying amount of BUA stuff - I'd be nervous about attempting to play it in one lifetime with OS-type rules - the whole idea teeters on the edge of being one enormous skirmish. One of my regular email correspondents said he would like to try this game using "Black Powder" rules. I think I'd like to see that, too, though only for a couple of hours, and as a visitor. These days (and it is entirely my own problem) I get exhausted thinking about which figures are firing out of which window of which building - I prefer the (board-gamey) approach that a particular battalion is either still in that bit of the village or is not - I'm happy to accept that there is a level of detail below what I can see or enact, in the interests of practicability.
I am thinking of writing a book on the subject of "how to fight big Napoleonic battles without doing your brain in, and without the need for nursing staff standing by". Of course, I will have to think about it for a very long time first.
Great pictures Tony, and a hard fought battle. I like Goyas boards with the hexes marked up that way.
DeleteHi Lee - yes, that's a good way of denoting the hex grid, but I do think it becomes important to use scenic base-plates under woods, villages, farm fields etc - it avoids ambiguity over where they are, locates the terrain features obviously and intuitively and breaks up the look of the thing. The surface is a type of felt, which is easy on the eye and doesn't shine in the photos!
DeleteAfterthoughts: one of my photos which did not come out well (blurred with emotion) was of the downfall of the regiment which Legrand himself led into action - the photo of the start of their attack is somewhere in the narrative. A classic melee in the history of Foy Productions - my guys, attacking with 4 [bases] +1 [French line] - 2 [vs a BUA] = 3 dice managed to inflict one loss on the Austrian residents; the Austrian line regiment fighting back rolled 4 dice [remaining strength], which came up as 4 nice little infantry symbols - so much for the fresh unit. To add insult to injury, the requisite Leader check killed off Legrand himself - that's 2 VPs gone to Hades in less time than it takes to read about it. If it had been possible for Massena's little shoulders to droop in his carriage they would surely have done so at that moment - pity the photo didn't come out...
ReplyDeleteA further point of interest is that Count Goya, who of course is a Famous Mad Scientist, subsequently wrote us a nice little paper on the history of the plastic soldier. If I can get permission from his legal department, with sufficient editing and censorship, I might reproduce the gist of this in a future post.
As wargames, these might not be quite state of the art, but - By Gum! - we are keen. Watch this space.