World at War: Operation Garbo arrived yesterday. It is an expansion module for World at War: Blood and Bridges, and whose setting is LNLP's fictictious World War III in the Spring of 1985. This module focuses on a Soviet invasion of Sweden.

 

The box comes with two map boards, 176 5/8" counters representing Swedish and Soviet units, six scenarios within a scenario booklet which includes some module spefic rules, and two Player-Aid Cards.

 

One map is somewhat more wooded than the other, which is described to better represent "typical" northern Sweden.

 

As the module has begun to arrive and be inspected, some concerns have been voiced, in particular a "Moving Fire" capability for the Swedish S-Tank and a highest offical rating yet, in this series, for the Swedish infantry - both points reflect the view of the module designer, a swede, and are IMO debatable.

 

Some module specific rules include a special defense capability for the STRV-103 S Tank due its ability to lower itself to an even lower profile, leaders (something new in this series), limited amphibious operations, and mounted firepower.

 

Scenarios include Swedish reactions to a Soviet attack while suffering from command and control disruptions, a limited counterattack, a delay, a massive counterattack, a small battle (after the Swedish Chief of Staff's helo gets shot down and he links up with some ragtag units), and finally a Soviet attempt to expand a Gotland beach head in the face of increasing Swedish resistance.

 

I look forward to getting this onto a table sometime soon.

I didn't think the S-tank could/should fire while moving, I mean its just not built for it. whole point is it comes to a stop squats behind something and fires and then usually moves again once it thinks its seen (usually in reverse) if it is possible to fire while moving it would have to be at a great penalty also 1985 model would have original fire control systems I believe, pretty low tech relying primarily on the stable platform of being a non turret for its accuracy. Overall the tank received high marks upon initial production from other nations but never adopted by anybody else because it was suited almost purely as a defensive vehicle in the hopes of Sweden holding out till usa came to help or attrition for the soviets would be high enough that they would sue for peace similar to fins in ww2.

I plan on playing it without that ability to fire and move and see how it works out. I based it upon this video I found after a cursory search. Toward the very end it emphatically states that it cannot move/fire.

 

Cool little documentary it looks like an old A model and would correspond with a 1985 scenario. As far as I can remember reading only a handful were ever given amphib capabilities but that part of the video is pretty funny looking, looks like the same amphib setup they tried to give tanks during the D-day assaults. I always taught of them more as tank destroyers then actual tanks but seems the classification went away after Korea so just about anything with a big gun and little or no troop capabilities and some armor was considered a tank.

Some design rationales from the designer of this expansion:

 

Copy paste

http://www.krigsspel.se/forum/viewtopic.ph...32&start=60

 

 

A number of years ago WaW Eisenbach Gap was published. I bought a copy immediately and enjoyed playing it very much. I e-mailed Mark and asked if he could do a Scandianvian expansion. He mailed back and said that he would like to have one and if I wanted to do it, it was fine by him. So I started to work on Op Garbo. This was before Blood and Bridges, even before Death of the 1st Panzers.

 

I questioned Mark how I should rate Swedish hardware and how he gave values to the US and Soviet vehicles in WaW EG. I did not get a clear answer, more like rough guidelines. So the Swedish stats were basically extrapolated from the US and Soviet values ( a swedish 105mm gun is basically the same as a US one and so on) As work progressed I got the stats from ”Blood and Bridges” to check if my values were in the ballpark, which I thought they were. I honestly did not think the infantry values would create such a furor.

 

Now a number of questions have arisen to why certain units have certain values. I will try to explain my thinking.

 

I gave some Soviet units a morale of 8 as these are the elite units of the Soviet warmachine. These were the best trained, best equipped and most motivated soldiers the Sovietunion could muster. I believe they were comparable to the US Elite units such as rangers, 82nd airborne. Thus to give them a certain edge over ordinary infantry units, which typically have 6 or 7 in morale, I gave them 8. If a future expansion adds rangers, other airborne forces or british paras I would not be upset if they also got 8 in morale.

 

In my playtesting I did not have the ”move an fire” capability to either the S-tank or the Centurion. I must have made a mistake somewhere as this capability went into the game.

 

PBV302 assault value. The Swedish APC was designed to let the troopers fight EFFECTIVELY from the vehicle. It therefore had two large tophatches which let the entire squad in the back stand up (although exposed from the upper chest and above) and fire. So instead of looking through small narrow apartures in the hull and firing without using the weapons sights the troopers could see well and engage targets well, ( although it is never easy to hit targets from a moving vehicle). This was also reguraly practised with live fire drills in battlefield like conditions (driving over uneven terrain, with trees around and engaging small, hidden targets at different ranges). I believe this would augment an APC platoons assault value as not only the APC can fight, but also the infantry squad.

 

The PBV302 also had a built in ”spaced armour” that would reduce the effectivness of HEAT warheads. The outer armour was fairly thin, inside this armour was 1,5 feet wide storage space area before the main armour of the vehicle. This also gave the vehicle its bouyancy and ability to swim rivers and even lakes.

 

Sweden had a conscript army. Conscripts are not worse soldiers than volunteers, I honestly don´t understand why conscript is authomatically equalled to "worse soldier" than volunteers. West Germany had a conscript army and the soldiers "behind the counters" in Death of the 1st Panzers are conscripts. Israel also have a conscript army and the soldiers behind ”their” counters in the expansion in LoF.

 

And the biggest complaint. The Swedish infantry combat values. This is my reasoning: Sweden had a very large proportion of support weapons to its platoons. As Sweden knew that any aggressor would have lots of armoured vehicles, the Swedish answer was "anti-tank capability in every bush, behind every tree". So infantry platoons had lots of AT capability. Even fieldkitchen units had GPMGs, 84mm recoilless rifles and disposable LAW:s.

 

The 84mm RR is a very capable weapon. It has a very good reach, more than twice that of an LAW and very good hitting power. I understand the argument that it is a high increase with one extra dice that upsets people. I also do not think that a swedish platoon is 33% more effective than another foreign platoon. But the dice system in WaW is fairly coarse and it is difficult to give a unit a "small" increase in firepower. As an ordinary platoon has 2 dice and I cannot add half a dice I was stuck with one extra dice or nothing.

 

I understand the complaints and it is not "nationalstic bravado and Swedish selfworshipping" that made me give them 1 extra dice. I wanted to give them a small extra edge, as I believe that correctly models reality. But I was stuck with either nothing or 1 extra dice. If I was nationalistic I would not have made the Swedish ”home guard” units so weak and would not have made the Soviet paratroopers so strong.

 

Another reason I gave the Swedes one extra dice was I only thought in a context relating to its opponents, the Soviets. I did not think of it as an comparison to the US forces in WaW EG, which was the only other module at the time I assigned the values to the Swedes.

 

I wanted to model Swedish mech inf and Soviet paras as more capable than ordinary Soviet infantry. I did not intend to integrate US, British or West German units in the module or future scenarios.

 

As I can see now, with a couple of years´ hindsight ,all troops (Syrian, Canadian, Soviet, British, German, American, Israeli) having the exact same stats I would not have given Swedish infantry that extra edge.

 

Had I designed the module today with alot of other modules available for comparison I would not have given them that extra dice.

 

S tank and its defense value "bar/cage armour" giving great protection against HEAT warheads. From the front the cage armour makes the warhead detonates between 1,5 feet up to 5 feet from the main armour. If kinetic rounds hit the cage armour the chance that the projectile is distured before it hits the main armour also increases. As the front armour is very sloped it also greatly increases the chance that a kinetic round will ”slide off” ( not modern 1990:s long rod penetrators, but older models of kinetic projectiles).

 

A picture of the cage armour can be seen on Wikipedia

 

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