Tobruk

Tank actions in North Africa, June 1942

The scale

One hex is a hundred metres. One turn is one minute. One counter is a single vehicle, a gun and its detachment, or a section of infantry. Ranges on the range card are in metres, so a mark eight hexes off is eight hundred metres away — a long shot for a 1942 tank gun.

The lay

This is the rule the game turns on. Every round you fire at a mark teaches your gunner where the last one fell, including the ones that miss. Fire at the same mark again, from the same hex, and your chance improves sharply.

Rounds laid on	Effect
none — a ranging shot	×0.55
one — bracketed	×1.00
2 — ranged in	×1.28
3 — ranged in	×1.42

Move, and the lay is gone. If the mark moves, it drops back a step. That is the whole tension of the game: a body that stands still gets better at killing and easier to kill.

A body that drives hard gets one snap shot instead of its rate of fire, and shoots it badly. A short bound — half the allowance or less — keeps a second round. Bounding forward is a real option, not merely a slower way of not shooting.

Giving orders

Select one of your own counters and the ground it can reach this turn is shaded. Click inside that area to march there. Click an enemy counter you can see and the range card opens; press Fire to shoot. A counter with a small amber pip has a lay on somebody.

Rest the pointer on anything on the board and a card opens beside it. For one of your own it gives the gun, the plate, what movement and how many rounds are left, the ammunition aboard, the lay and the standing order. For an enemy you can see it gives what you can see and what the body is worth, and with one of your own selected it adds the range between them and whether the mark is hull down to it. Rest it on a stale report and all you get is how old the report is — which is all a report can tell you.

Reading the range card

The card names every term in the shot rather than giving you a single number to trust: the range, the lay, whether either of you moved, whether the mark is hull down, what the heat haze is doing beyond fourteen hundred metres, the state of your crew, the plate the round must beat at the face it strikes, and whether this gun at this range will go through it. If it will not go through, moving to a flank is worth more than another round.

Seeing and being seen

You do not see the enemy; you receive reports. A dashed ring with a number in it is a report and the number is how many minutes old it is — the ring widens as it goes stale. Anything that fires is seen at once. Guns are small, low and hard to make out until they do. A vehicle that moves in the open throws up dust, which gives it away at long range and then screens it.

Ground

Ground	MP	Cover	Notes
Open desert	1	0
Desert track	0.75	0
Stony going	1.5	1
Camel scrub	1.5	1
Soft sand	3	0
Ridge crest	2	1	hull down
Wadi	2	2	hull down, blocks sight
Sangars	2	3	hull down
Ditch crossing	2.5	1
Anti-tank ditch	—	2	hull down, no vehicles
Broken rock	—	2	blocks sight, no vehicles

Guns and plate

An armour-piercing round has to beat the plate at the spot it strikes. A flank is softer than a glacis and a rear is softer still, so getting round a mark is often worth more than standing and hammering it. High explosive is a poor way to kill a tank and a good way to kill a gun detachment — and the British two-pounder and six-pounder carry none at all, which is why a British gun line is answered with tanks and a German one with high explosive.

A Grant carries its seventy-five in a sponson. It fires only into the front arc, and it cannot be fired at all when the tank is hull down, because the gun cannot be brought to bear without showing the hull. Getting a Grant behind the ground costs it its main armament.

Gun lines

Dug-in anti-tank guns are hard to see, hard to hit and cheap. The quick answer is to drive onto them: a vehicle may enter a hex held by a gun or by infantry, the detachment fires at point-blank range as it comes on, and then one of the two is finished. High explosive first, to put their heads down, makes it a great deal more likely to be the gun.

Winning

A thousand points a side: five hundred for ground, paid every half turn, and five hundred for the share of the enemy's starting value you destroy. Your result is read against par — what the ground and the odds ought to yield a competent officer on that seat. In an assault the defender out-scores the attacker by design, so the raw totals are not comparable and par is what makes them so.

Action	Par, DAK	Par, 8th Army
The Cauldron	178	690
Knightsbridge	427	494
El Adem Ridge	227	599

Your first action

Take The Cauldron with the Afrikakorps against a Regular. You are attacking across open going in 16 turns. Push your Panzer IIIs forward in short bounds so they keep a second round, use the stony rises and the wadis, and do not stand in the open trading fire at fifteen hundred metres — at that range nobody hits anything and you will run out of ready ammunition before you run out of enemy. Get inside eight hundred metres, stop, and range in.