The Battle of Lembitu: Tiger in ambush

My wife and I had a wargaming friend of mine staying with us overnight on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning I set up a MEMOIR '44 scenario on my wargames table for us to fight out. Both of us were relatively new to using MEMOIR '44 with figures rather than with the playing pieces and boards that come with the game, so I chose a scenario that had a mixture of armour, infantry, and artillery. I was able to use some of my collection of 20mm-scale figures and vehicles as well as my Hexon II terrain.

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The scenario I chose was BATTLE OF LEMBITU: TIGER IN AMBUSH. The map that comes with the scenario looks like this:

I managed to almost completely reproduce this on my tabletop, the results looked like this:

(The only problems that I had were:

• I could not fit the right-hand row of hexes on the tabletop;
• I had no suitable terrain features that would indicate marshes ... so I used some oblongs of dark olive green felt that I normally use to represent minefields.)

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The game briefing stated:

'On the 17th of March 1944, near the Estonian village of Lembitu, west of Narva, the Soviet Army launched a massive attack on German defensive positions guarding the strategic railway Narva-Tallinn. German infantrymen were quickly in trouble because of the numbers, but the coming of two Tigers tanks of the 502.schwere Panzer Abteilung changed the fate of the battle. Russians tanks couldn't resist the counter-attack of the two Tigers led by Otto Carius, a famous ace of the German Panzerwaffe. At the end of the day, more than fifteen tank wrecks were scattered on the battlefield. The Russian attack was repelled.

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Because I got so engrossed in actually fighting this battle, I forgot to take any photographs as it progressed ... which was a pity but it does show how intense our involvement in the wargame was.

I commanded the Russians whilst my friend took charge of the Germans. The end result was a victory for the Germans. (They had destroyed three each of my Armoured and Infantry units whilst my Russians had only managed to destroy one of the German Armoured units and two of their Infantry units.)

In the post-battle discussions about the rules there were one or two things that we felt needed improving, but that these were minor cosmetic changes and did not require a full-scale revision of the rules. We also both felt that part of the enjoyment we gained from this battle was due in no small part to the fact that we had used painted toy soldiers and vehicles rather than the plastic playing pieces that come with the game.

I used figures from my MEGABLITZ collection for this battle ... and both of us felt that using two two-figure bases for each Infantry unit worked well, and that this was better than the single-figure units we had used previously. Likewise the fact that casualties to Infantry units were indicated by 'kill rings' (actually plastic blind rings) rather than figure removal was more aesthetically appealing.