WARGAMESOSD

GDW Red Army (1)
 
The Destruction of Army Group Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

wargames.wilkey.org.uk

 

Summer 1944

Summer 1944: Three years earlier, Byelorussia had fallen to blitzkrieg tactics of the German Army Group Center.

The Germans now fell victim to the same tactics, as the Soviet Army struck back. Army Group Center, outnumbered by its opponent in men, guns, tanks, and aircraft and with its lines of communications threatened by the largest partisan movement in the USSR, collapsed when the Soviet offensive began on June 23, 1944.

The forces of four Soviet fronts - commanded by Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Union's ablest general surged westwards, surrounding and overrunning the German units before them. German reinforcements, rushed to Byelorussia from all over Europe, together with the few survivors of Army Group Center, managed by desperate fighting to halt the Soviets near the 1941 German-Soviet border.

In a month's campaign, the Red Army has liberated Byelorussia and destroyed a German army group.
Red Army is an operational-level game on Operation Bagration, the World War II Soviet offensive that routed and destroyed an entire German army group. Red Army covers the first month of the campaign, when the forces of the 1st Baltic Front and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts attacked and substantially destroyed Army Group Center, driving its remnants out of Byelorussia into Poland and Lithuania.

Red Army is a two-player game. One player (the Soviet player commands the Soviet forces; the other player (the German player) commands the German and Hungarian forces.

Game Components

Red Army has the following components:

A. Maps: There are four maps, labeled NE, SE, NW, and SW. The maps are assembled into the game map by placing the south edges of the NE and NW maps adjacent to the north edges of the SE and SW maps, respectively; then the east edges of the NW and SW maps are placed adjacent to the west edges of the NE and SE maps. When assembled, the game map portrays Byelorussia, part of Lithuania, and part of Poland, where the campaign was fought. A hexagonal grid is superimposed on each map, to regulate the positioning and movement of units. The hexagons (hexes) are numbered to assist easy location of specific hexes. In the rules, a specific hex is indicated by its map and hex number. For example, NE 2709 refers to hex number 2709 on the NE map.
The distance across a hex represents 10 kilometers.

B. Counters: There is one counter sheet, with a total of 240 counters. The counters are divided into three types: ground units, air units, and markers. Ground units (hereafter called units for brevity) represent the historical corps, divisions, and brigades which fought in the campaign. The information on these counters is explained on the unit identification chart. Air units represent the combat aircraft of the combatants. Markers are used to denote special conditions of units.

C. Rules and Charts: The rules booklet contains the rules and some of the charts needed to play the game. The remaining charts, included as separate pages, are: two combat results and terrain effects charts and two air charts.

D. The Die: One die is included.
Sequence of Play

The game is played in a series of game turns, each of which represents the passage of two days. A game turn is divided into two player turns: a Soviet player turn followed by a German player turn. During the Soviet player turn, the Soviet player is the phasing player and the German player is the non-phasing player; during the German player turn, these roles are reversed.

A player turn consists of the following phases:

1. Initial Phase: Every unit (both phasing and non-phasing) in play has its supply condition assessed for the current player turn.

The phasing player checks to see if he receives any reinforcements this turn. Ground unit reinforcements enter play during the first movement phase. Air unit reinforcements are placed in the player's unallocated air units box of his air chart and are available for use from this time.
The non-phasing player may assign air units to fly interdiction in the current player turn. The phasing player may assign air units to intercept and negate the opposing player's interdiction air units.

2. First Movement Phase: The phasing player may move his ground units.

3. First Combat Phase: The phasing player may initiate and resolve battles.

4. Reserve Movement Phase: The non-phasing player may move his reserves.

Game Mechanics

Time Scale: 2 days per turn
Map Scale: 10 km per hex
Unit Scale: Division, Brigade, Battalion
Players: Two - Intermediate Complexity
Solitaire Suitability: Intermediate complexity
Playing Time: 6+ hours

Scenarios

1) Onslaught:
This scenario covers the initial period of the Soviet offensive. The game begins with Turn 1 and ends on the completion of Turn 6. Only the NE and The SE maps are used.
2) Operation Bagration:
The scenario covers the entire period of the Soviet Offensive in Byelorussia. The scenario begins with turn 1 and ends on completion of turn 18. All four maps are used.

Game components:

240 Die-Cut Counters
4 Colourful 17" x 22" Maps
1 Rules and scenario booklet
4 Game play reference cards
1 Die

Game Strategy

Standard hexagonal game mechanics with firly straight-forward rules, designed by Frank Chadwick & John Astell. There are 3 optional rules:

A) No surprise
B) Expected Offensive
C) Limited Withdrawal

5. Second Movement Phase: The phasing player may move his ground units.

6. Second Combat Phase: The phasing player may initiate and resolve battles.

When all phases of a player turn are finished, the player turn is over and the next one is started.

When both player turns are finished, the game turn is over and the next one is started. The turn record chart (located on the SE map may be used to keep track of the current turn.


Between Orsha and Krasnoye, elements of the 3rd Byelorussian Front face the German 4th Army, with
 a 4-5-5 Panzergrenadier Division to the north
Operation Bagration

Operation Bagration (Operatsiya Bagration) was the codename for the Soviet 1944 Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation during World War II, which cleared German forces from the Belorussian SSR and eastern Poland between 22 June 1944 and 19 August 1944.The operation was named after 18th–19th century Georgian Prince Pyotr Bagration, general of the Russian army who received a mortal wound at the Battle of Borodino. The Soviet armies directly involved in Operation Bagration were the 1st Baltic Front under Army General Hovhannes Bagramyan, the 1st Belorussian Front commanded by Army General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was promoted to Marshal on June 29, 1944, the 2nd Belorussian Front commanded by Colonel-General G. F. Zakharov, and the 3rd Belorussian Front commanded by Colonel-General Ivan Chernyakhovsky. This action resulted in the almost complete destruction of the German Army Group Centre and three of its component armies: Fourth Army, Third Panzer Army and Ninth Army. The operation "was the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II". By the end of the operation most of the western Soviet Union had been liberated and the Red Army had achieved footholds in Romania and Poland.

The objectives of the operation are more complicated. The Red Army practiced the concept of Soviet Deep Operations, Soviet Deep Battle and Maskirovka, (military deception). It has been suggested the primary target of the Soviet offensive was bridgehead on the Vistula river in central Poland, and that Operation Bagration was to create a crisis in Belorussia to divert German mobile reserves to the central sectors as a part of Maskirovka, removing them from the Lublin-Brest, Lvov-Sandomierz area area where the Soviets intended to undertake the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive and Lublin-Brest Offensive. This allowed the Red Army to reach the Vistula river and Warsaw, which in turn put Soviet forces within striking distance of Berlin, conforming to the concept of Soviet deep operations - striking deep into the enemy's strategic depths.

Army Group Centre had previously proved tough to defeat as the Soviet defeat in Operation Mars had shown. But by June 1944, despite shortening its front line, it had been exposed following the severe defeats of Army Group South in the battles that followed the Battle of Kursk, the Liberation of Kiev and the Liberation of the Crimea in the late summer, autumn and winter of 1943–44—the soviet-called third period of the Great Patriotic War. Operation Suvorov had seen Army Group Centre itself forced to retreat westwards from Smolensk during the autumn of 1943.

 Background

By the middle of June 1944 the Western Allies on the Cotentin Peninsula were just over 1046 km (650 miles) from Berlin, while the Soviet forces at the Vitebsk Gate were within 1200 km (745 miles) of the German capital. For the Third Reich the strategic threats were about the same. Hitler underestimated the threat posed by Soviet troops facing Army Group Centre and had redeployed one third of Army Group Centre's artillery, half their tank destroyers and 88 percent of their tanks to the Southern front where the German high command expected the next major Soviet offensive.

Bagration, in combination with the neighbouring Lvov-Sandomierz Offensive launched a few weeks later in Ukraine, allowed the Soviet Union to recapture Belorussia and the Ukraine within its 1941 borders, advance into German East Prussia, but more importantly, the Lvov-Sandomierz operation allowed the Red Army to reach the outskirts of Warsaw after gaining control of Poland east of the Vistula river. The operation enabled the next operation, Vistula–Oder Offensive, to come within sight of the German capital. The Soviets were initially surprised at their success of the Belorussian operation which had nearly reached Warsaw. The Soviet advance encouraged the Warsaw uprising against the German occupation forces. This enabled Joseph Stalin to destroy, indirectly, his enemies in Poland by allowing the Germans to crush the uprising. Stalin was irritated by the military success in the central sector as it forced him to reveal more of his post war intent earlier than he would have liked.

The battle has been described as the triumph of the Soviet theory of "the operational art" because of the complete co-ordination of all the Strategic Front movements and signals traffic to fool the enemy about the target of the offensive. The military tactical operations of the Red Army successfully avoided the mobile reserves of the Wehrmacht and continually "wrong-footed" the German forces. Despite the huge forces involved, Soviet front commanders left their adversaries completely confused about the main axis of attack until it was too late.

Above text courtesy of Wikipedia

Initial Game Setup