Capture Pegasus Bridge

Some time ago I purchased a set of WWII 3d print terrain files, which included a file for Pegasus bridge...

So I printed it up.

Having printed it up I then had to build a river for is to span, and I made this in matching terrain tiles to my existing modular wargames table.

There were a few dramas with this having to manage some leaking resin, but I managed to rescue it and the boards were finally ready.

I also had to get some more buildings painted up, again that I had printed out some time ago, including cafe Gondree.

The defenses at Pegasus bridge included trench lines, MG Pits and a KWK 5cm emplacement.

I had some trench sections I had scratch built some time ago for FoW, and these worked fine for 28mm too.

The MG pits were an easy 3d print from files I had, and I managed to find a file for the 5cm gun and emplacement online. The gun I resin printed and the emplacement was filament printed.

I also found a file to 3d print the Horsa Glider. Sadly my attempts at getting decals printed for it didnt work out.

Now to play a game...

My preferred set of rules for WWII is Battlegroup, by Warwick Kinraide, distributed by Plastic Soldier Company. Whilst designed for 20mm, with some mods they can be scaled up to 28mm (my preferred scale of miniatures - anything smaller I find annoyingly fiddly).

Now I needed a scenario... I couldn't find a specific Battlegroup one but was pointed to a fan made Bolt Action one which I could adapt to BG with a few tweaks.

Link Here

And so the game was planned and finally ready to play 1st Oct 23, ... I ran the Germans and Ste and Bryan , brought their British Airborne troops.

Whilst BG is my preferred game, I was a bit rusty with it, as I very rarely get to play,  so decided not to video it as it probably wouldn't have made for entertaining viewing as we constantly referenced the rules.

The Game:

In quick summary, the British launch their attack, under the Night Fighting rules, closing on the bridge and capturing the uncrewed 5cm gun position and empty slit trench.

At this point the scenario allowed German Reinforcements to start arriving , by random entry point... and I was lucky to get my PzIII arrive in the rear of the British advance and machinegunned a Vickers MG team, they fell back to a nearby wooded copse to avoid the worst of the fire, losing one man.

In the subsequent British round they fired the 5cm gun at the tank and hit it a glancing shot, this forced a morale test for the crew, which I promptly rolled a 1 for, and this would still have been OK, had not the Vickers team been in close proximity. So the German crew abandoned their tank!

In the subsequent German round more German reinforcements arrived in a Hanomag and this promptly secured the German end of the bridge.

By the victory conditions we had set, including capturing objectives and tracking casualties thus far, this broke the British force.

We thought about playing on anyway to see if the British could force their way over the bridge still, ... but instead decided to retry the scenario using the intended Bolt Actions rules as per scenario we were using.

We got much the same result in the time we had left... The British capturing one end of the bridge but still not really being in a position to force their way over the bridge.

I did have to suffer some of the daft bits of BA rules, like a sniper knocking out a MG team with a single shot, and daft ranging mortar rules... (I'm not a huge fan of BA)... but in the end the game result was much the same.

Bryan commented after the game that he felt the British were making poor progress in BG compared to BA... and it was only afterwards I realized I had forgotten the movement changes for the 28mm mod for BG. Oh well, hopefully we'll do better next time!

Here's some pics from the board layout, deployment, and in game.

We hope to bring a video Battle report of WWII show casing Battlegroup rules in the not too distant future

Layout and terrain by Scott Bowman

Board was 8' x 4'

Germans by Scott Bowman

figures from Warlord Games Bolt Action 28mm range

British by Ste Haran and Bryan Thomson

figures from Warlord Games Bolt Action 28mm range (I believe!)

3D Print files mostly from

www.3dprintterrain.de

They have various WWII (and many other) sets... Note their default scale is 20mm... so you need to scale up for 28mm or down for 15mm!

The 5cm Gun : 5cm KwK 39 by Kpi1986 - Thingiverse

Nite the emplacement file in the above needs 'settling'... (my print kept failing till I realised its hadnt been set flat to the plate). Once settled, save then slice & print.

I currently use an Anycubic Kobra for filament printing and a Anycubic Ultra & D2

for detail resin printing.

Filament:  PLA+ Filament 1.75mm Grey 1KG Roll – Kapiti Hobbies