SABOW - revenge of the Chieftains

[33LIMA 972]

Swings and roundabouts...with tanks!

 

My first Iran-Iraq War campaign in Graviteam's rather excellent & recently-relaunched wargame/tanksim Steel Armor - Blaze of War (SABOW) had been a bit experimental, not least as I only discovered some quite useful aspects of the wagrame interface towards the end of my assigned eight turns. My final battle had been inconclusive, resulting in a drawn campaign overall. So I decided to replay it from the get go, rather than move on to the other available campaign in that war, which is from the Iranian side in an M60. No, I decided to stick with my trusty T-62. With my new-found knowledge I would fling my platoons across the battlefield with the verve of a Rommel and the cunning of a Montgomery. At least that was the idea. Needless to say, it didn't work out quite like that...to begin with, anyway.

 

Reasonably enough, it seems that each SABOW campaign starts off with the same tactical situation, based on the real-life battle - in this case, with an Iranian salient (red) having been driven into Iraqi territory (blue in the map below - I have reversed the Soviet-style SABOW colour convention in the options menu). What makes each campaign run-through different is (i) the different moves made by the AI in the 'wargame layer' (which AI controls all enemy units and those friendly ones the player can't give orders to) and (ii) the moves you the player make, with the platoons you do control.

 

Last time, I had spent a lot of time in 'wait and see' mode, mostly in a defensive posture - let the enemy come to me, if he dared. Which of course he did dare, though in his own sweet time. On this occasion, I decided that I would call the shots. I waited for the first part of the turn to play out, during which the enemy's movements are made. Having discovered that I could then pre-position my units in the initial map, shown below, I shifted my troops - three tank platoons plus the tank company HQ element. I moved them north-west, along the tracks shown by the little blue arrows. Basically I laid the company out so as to be able to advance 'two up' - two platoons leading, roughly side-by-side, with the third platoon 'in depth' to the rear, along with Company HQ. My intention was to drive north-west, cutting the shaft of the enemy spear, somewhere behind its tip, where I hoped most of its offensive strength (tanks!) would lie.

 

 

As expected, these dispositions caused SABOW to offer me a battle, in my chosen sector. So it was off to the Unit Deployment screen to...well, to deploy my units, what else? I didn't seem to have air or artillery support available and the available infantry were evidently fully occupied defending on the other side of the battlefield. Our tank platoons were the only forces available in my sector so we would have to be thown into battle alone.

 

 

The nasty red arrows on the map above showed that we now had intelligence that the enemy was expected to attack in our sector, coming in roughly from the oppisite direction to my planned offensive. If I'd had that particular piece of 'int' earlier, I might have sat and taken them on from defensive positions. But I'd made my plans and decided to stick to them. The 'int' might be wrong. Even if it wasn't, we might catch them while they were forming up. It was not yet daylight and I had confidence in the night-fighting abilities of my T-62s, not to mention our stabilised 115mm smoothbore guns. If a meeting engagement developed, so be it. I was up for it. I quickly switched to the orders screen. A few clicks and my platoons had their orders - attack towards the north-west! Fire at will!

 

My experience so far has been that enemy attacks in SABOW take time to develop. But not this time. I had no sooner begun scanning through the commander's sight of one of my platoon leader's T-62s when the shooting started. I switched to the gunner's sight and picked up an M-113 APC coming straight at us, coming into and out of sight amongst intervening clumps of vegetation. This was not a good time to discover that I hadn't bothered to learn the gunner's night sight. Which of its markings represented my point of aim, for the APFSDS round I had loaded? I struggled to remember my brief perusal of the manual's description, but failed. I took aim, fired, and missed. I only knew that I had missed, because when the gun came back into firing position after the usual T-62 reloading cycle, the M-113 was still on the move and my commander didn't announce a hit. I had no idea whether I was over or short, because the elevation of the gun to reload took my gunsight skywards, with it, before I could see the fall of shot. This T-62 characteristic is bad enough in daylight, with a sight you are used to. In near darkness with an unfamiliar one, it was a recipe for disaster.

 

Disaster duly showed up. My tank commander called out a more pressing target. A Chieftain tank. Two of them, in fact.

 

 

The was a dull ringing, thumping sound which tailed off into a sort of buzzing. My view slipped down and off the gunsight, revealing bloody bodies in the turret. The tank brewed up rapidly as further AP rounds slammed into us. I think no-one got out.

 

 

I changed tanks several times. Those Chieftains seemed to be able to knock out my tanks, about as fast as I could occupy them. Their 120mm APDS rounds hit home and red-hot sparks flew.

 

 

 

As if to spare my blushes, SABOW decided enough was enough and ended the battle. Apaprently there are set conditions which trigger this, like one side calling it a day and retreating, or a truce being offered and accepted (an odd feature, which I haven't used yet). I considered myself lucky, that the fight was adjudged a draw. It didn't seem so, from where I had been sitting.

 

 

Day was breaking and the enemy seemed to be ranging freely over the battlefield, just to rub my nose in it.

 

 

So, the Chieftains had had their revenge, for such indignities as my T-62s had been able to inflict, in previous missions. Where had I gone wrong? For one thing, I'm not yet fully accustomed to the scale of the SABOW maps, which are not huge and limit your elbow room for deployment - not unreasonably in my view, as you are commanding a tank company in a battlegroup not a Panzer Armee or a fleet at sea, with wide boundaries and considerable freedom of movement. Still, I had set up my forces just a little too close to the enemy. And when I discovered they were attacking, I should have been a bit more flexible and changed to a defensive posture, moving onto the offensive after I had let the enemy waves break.

 

This wasn't over, though. The Chieftains had got some pay-back. Now, it was my turn.

 

...to be continued!

[33LIMA 972]

Revenge on the Chieftains!

 

I don’t understand why SABOW considered my last battle a draw. My nicely-laid out battalion attack, designed to concentrate my three tank companies against a hopefully thinly-defended enemy flank, had been pretty well smashed by the guns of the Iranian Chieftains. I had hoped their armour would all be further south and west, where the enemy attacks had been concentrated. And I expected to face a different challenge – without artillery support or adequate reconnaissance, attacking likely dug-in infantry defending the enemy flank. But the Chieftains had turned up and had won the fire fight, hands-down. The suddenness and violence with which my force had been smashed had come as a nasty shock.

Determined to do better, I returned to the fray. Starting on the ‘Operational’ map, I could see that the enemy was hitting our defences hard, in the south-west. I studied the dispositions of what I had left, over on the south-east. In short, I seemed to have lost two platoons of T-62s. But I still had a considerable force.

My tank platoons had been concentrated east of the enemy salient for the failed attack and I chose to stay concentrated there, shifting my units just slightly, ready instead for a defence in depth. Further south, nearer the tip of the enemy salient, I juggled the two tank platoons and one recce platoon I had down there, pulling them back slightly, into positions from which they could at least support one another, if attacked. That was my weakest sector but I accepted that, so as to be strong where I still intended the decisive battle would be fought - on the salient’s north-eastern flank. As Frederick the Great put it, ‘Wer alles defendieren will, defendiert gar nichts’.

I then ‘started the clock’ and SABOW offered me two battles, against incoming enemy attacks – one on my weak southern sector and another, to the north east, where I was more concentrated. I was naturally alarmed that the enemy had decided to attack my southern weak spot. But I quickly decided I would not be deflected from my own ‘schwerpunkt’. So I let the AI handle the fight in the south and instead, chose to accept battle to the north-east. This brought me as usual to the Unit Deployment map, where I found that I was now in command of the three-platoon tank company I had placed there, and whose dispositions I could now fine-tune.

The red, enemy arrows which I could now see pointed my way showed the attacks we now anticipated. Now, this was interesting! The arrows were diverging, rather than converging on a single area. This suggested a certain dispersal, rather than concentration, of enemy effort. And that their attacks could therefore be defeated in detail, one at a time, if I played my cards right...or got lucky. I would settle for either.

 

I placed one platoon in decent cover, facing south-west. They would be able to fire from defilade from beside a wood, near our northern position in a village, from where they could block the enemy if they moved against us there. To the south, I placed another platoon to block the way to our position down there, facing north-west. I didn’t used the 3-d deployment option but on the map, experimented with the line of sight tool to check that the platoons would not be too exposed to the enemy until they came into a suitable killing ground. Having moved on to the ‘Initial Orders’ screen, this killing ground I set our arcs of fire to cover, ensuring they overlapped.

 

As for my third T-62 platoon, I had placed this in the centre, in a slight fold in the ground, slightly set back from the one to the north to add a bit of depth and so that it could fire into the flanks of enemy advancing against either the northern or the southern platoons. Unfortunately, I was unable to dig defensive positions. And the artillery support icons remained obstinately greyed out. For the second time, I would fight this battle with just our tank’s guns. But this time, it was daylight.
 

You'll see the layout I'm trying to describe here soon, but I somehow neglected to get a map screenshot until the battle had started! But in short, my three T-62 platoons, three tanks each, were arrayed in a ragged row, running north to south, like the prongs of a trident pointing west at the enemy. The 'prong' in the middle could hit anybody heading for either of the other two 'prongs', who were protecting our two foremost key points.

 

Good to go! I started the battle and checked out the view from the command tank in each platoon. Below is the view to the south, from the lead tank of my centre platoon. you can see one of the tanks of my left-hand platoon, through the murky conditions which seem common in this campaign.

 

 

All of my tanks felt rather exposed, sitting out in the open. But appearances were somewhat deceptive; my centre platoon, for example, was hull-down behind a slight crest. And sitting halted in the poor visibility, I felt sure that we would be able to get in the first shots from such cover as we had, at any enemy who drove into our overlapping fields of fire. In effect, I had set up an area ambush, with fire from six tanks from two different directions covering each of the two likely enemy axes of advance. I’d have preferred all of us to be dug-in and generally, in better cover but I had tried to make the best use of what was available.

 

Plan and dispositions made! Time to find out what the enemy’s plans were. I believe it was Field Marshall Slim, of 14th Army fame, who said that, however preoccupied a commander may be with the elaboration of his own plans, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.

 

While I waited, I made some adjustments to my tanks’ positions, driving them individually into better positions where necessary. SABOW crews tend to unbutton when it’s quiet but I made them all close up and ordered them to ‘Stay concealed’ – at night invokes a ban on showing lights and in daytime, I hoped it would encourage people to stay in what cover there was.
 

 

I went back to the map and turned on time compression. It wasn’t long before this was stopped by a contact report, from the left-hand T-62 platoon, to the south. A small dark-coloured dart showed where the approaching enemy had been spotted. It was tipped with red diamonds - enemy tanks! You can see the little 'radio mast' symbols on two tanks from my southern platoon, indicating they are the source of the most recent radio message. My current tank, the closest tank in the centre platoon, is the amber diamond in the middle of the screen.

 

 

I jumped back to my tank and swung the commander’s sight around to the south-west. Higher up and with greater magnification, this would give me a better view than the gunner’s sight. My pulse quickened as tank tracers suddenly zipped back and forth across my line of sight. Then I saw them through the murk. The turrets of two tanks, which I identified at once as Chieftains, emerged from some broken ground, moving right to left towards my left-hand platoon and the friendly position they were covering. The range I estimated at 600 metres. This needed no adjustment to my gunner’s sight, set to suit APFSDS, to which I now dropped, after designating one of the tanks as a platoon target. Though now lower down, I could still see the turrets and aiming slightly ahead for forward movement, I let her rip, going for the leading tank.

A Chieftain turret, which was all I could see, is a rather low profile target, so I was quite relieved when my first round ht home with a dull flash, confirmed by my commander. The reloading cycle didn’t completely destroy my view of the enemy and I fired again when ready. Another hit! This time the enemy tank stopped moving, its gun still facing away from me. The second Chieftain speeded up and passed my now-burning first target, moving fast. I traversed left and applied a suitable lead. He had come out into the open and made a better target, broadside on, still facing my left-hand platoon. They were obviously now in grave danger; suddenly, the stakes were as high as they could be.

 

 

I fired again, aiming lower now, the enemy tank’s sides having come into view. And again. Parts flew off the Iranian tank, perhaps dislodged stowage boxes or bazooka plates from over her tracks. He too started to burn!

 

 

I knew that where there were two enemy tanks, there were likely to be more. Traversing right again, further right from my first target, I spotted another Chieftain turret, stationary, and let him have it.

 

 

At this point, things started to get a bit frantic. The cover from which the enemy tanks were emerging just seemed to keep on spewing forth more and more Chieftains.  A veritable procession of tank turrets appeared, like targets in some sort of crazy fairground shooting gallery. I was soon out of 'fin' rounds and switched to HEAT. This was now real sweaty-palm stuff. I was conscious that I had rather abandoned any attempt to control my platoon or direct its fire, apart from making a couple of efforts to mark targets. I could only hope for the best and keep shooting; a moment's hestiation seemed likely to invite a firey disaster.

 

 

During all this, I finally saw a Chieftain turn to face us. Before I could shoot him, he dipped down out of sight somewhere. I lined up my sights where I expected him to re-appear, but he didn’t. My command T-62 was by now almost out of armour piercing rounds and I switched to my number three tank to carry on the fight. Scannning from the commander's sight, I engaged what must have been a different Chieftain which appeared to be climbing towards us from a ditch, well to the left of where I had just seen one drop out of sight. I engaged him with results unobserved, except that he promptly dropped out of view again. By this time, my fresh mount was completely out of anti-tank rounds - more than half our T-62's unspectacular 40-round ammo load was HE fragmentation, not much use in a tank fight. I should have tried to get some more AP rounds before the battle!

 

 

There was a lull in the firing. Ahead of me, the ground was littered with knocked out Iranian tanks, many burning, some flaring up from ammo cooking off. My centre platoon had had no losses. But what had become of my left-hand platoon, which had been directly in the path of the oncoming torrent of Chieftains?

 

 

...to be continued!

[33LIMA 972]

A final enemy fling!

 

The a lull in the firing continued. I ordered my platoon to cease fire, to prevent ammo being wasted shooting up escaped tank crews, that might soon be needed for more important targets.

 

Various beeps on the radio net had indicated incoming radio messages which, if they had displayed as text, I hadn’t read or if played in Russian, I hadn’t understood (all SABOW voices are in that language).  I now called up the map, to read the message log...and in particular, to find out how my left-hand platoon had stood up to the concentrated Iranian tank attack. This we had halted, but at what cost?

 

 

In the message log, top right of the screen above, contact reports mingled with reports of tanks lost and commanders killed. In fact, my left-hand platoon had been wiped out in the short but vicious firefight. The map indicated intact enemy tanks still down there but they were old contacts still marked up, sighted by my dead platoon before the end came.  However, I had myself seen two Chieftains turn towards us and drive into cover from which they had not yet emerged. I decided it was time to shift position, partly to thwart any enemy countermove and partly to get into a better position from which to get at the remaining enemy.

To the left rear of my centre platoon was a strip of woods, running north-south beside an irrigation channel. I drove my tanks over there and into cover, one moving while the others covered. A track worn into the ground just beyond the trees gave us a little extra protection.

 

 

 

We made it without incident and I started scanning again. I put a round into a stationary Chieftain who wasn’t already burning, just in case. To our left rear, I now had a clear view of what was left of my platoon down there – basically, blazing T-62s whose ammo cooked off noisily, every so often.

 

 

Hard left, we were now much closer to the knocked-out Chieftains. The company had paid a price, but we had held our key point and reaped a savage harvest from amongst our attackers.

 

 

 

It looked like we had done it, this time! A heavy attack by at least two platoons of enemy heavy tanks had been reduced to scrap metal. I couldn’t see the one or two Chieftains that had gone to ground so kept a wary eye out for them, but I suspected it (or they) had re-appeared unseen and were now amongst the many knocked-out tanks which marked the course of the failed enemy thrust. Just as well, because all but HE ammo was getting very low; the T-62’s 40-round loadout doesn’t seem to go very far, in a sustained tank action. I began to relax...

...but not for long! A contact report suddenly came in from my right hand platoon, up north, reporting another enemy advance - more tanks!

 

 

I jumped back to the gunner's sight in my centre platoon's command T-62 and scanned for the enemy. There they were - at least two more Chieftains! They were barely visible in the gloomy conditions as they crossed the open ground over to the north west, maybe 800 metres away at most. At this point I remembered that this tank was out of armour piercing rounds of any description!

 

 

In something approaching panic, I switched to my next tank, who wasn't much better off, with just a few HEAT rounds left. By this time, however, the enemy armour was flitting into and out of sight, screened most of the time by the ragged line of trees to out front, which stretched off to our right. If the enemy tanks had spotted us, we were in trouble! But no, we were in luck. They came back into view as they carried on to the east, then turned north-east towards our platoon and the nearby key point up there. I started firing at the leading Chieftain as soon as my sights came on. By this time the enemy tank was nearly rear-on to me, which helped, as it reduced his effective crossing speed and presented his thinnest armour. I quickly hit him, waited impatiently for the reloading cycle, then hit him again. He stopped and the crew bailed out, catching a short burst from my co-ax in the process. 

 

 

But he wasn’t alone. First one, then two more Chieftains emerged from behind the palm tree screen to my right front. They seemed unaware that their leader had been shot from behind and I was soon treating them in the same manner with my remaining HEAT ammo, while rounds from my other platoon crashed into them from the north. This was exactly the way I had planned it – the enemy advance locking on to the platoon defending their objective then being caught by concentric fire from their flank. I’d now pulled this off twice, in fact! This second time was easier, a smaller enemy force, caught in a more exposed position. It was soon all over.

 

That was about it! SABOW called it time...and on this occasion, I had no difficulty agreeing with the final assessment - a 'TOTAL VICTORY'!

 

The ‘Operation’ option to the left of the results table above would, I think, have let me carry on with the next battle or turn. It was getting late, though, and I decided to call it a day. But first, I used the ‘Statistics’ option to run a free camera over the battlefield. This lets you look at hits, damage and other key stuff for every tank or other unit; but I just wanted to take a quick peek at the damage I had done. It was satisfyingly extensive.

The southern attack had included no less than ten Chieftains. Most were on fire, though realistically, they don’t burn as fiercely as T-62s, Chieftains having water stowage for their bagged main round propellant charges. The ones I had seen dipping out of view had evidently ended up destroyed or mired in the irrigation channel next to which they had attacked. In turning to counterattack my centre platoon, they hadn’t got very far. Which was just as well for me!

 

 

 

 

To the north, another trail of knocked-out Iranian heavy tanks, four in number, marked the failure of their second attack, with surviving crew members seeking what cover they could. All in all, it was an impressive testament to the firepower of my T-62s, when brought to bear from an advantageous quarter and in overlapping fields of fire.

 

 

 

As the previous mission had shown, Chieftain is a very dangerous adversary for the T-62 and head on, is well able to take on and destroy superior numbers, day or night - much as they were designed to do. Caught in the flank, though, they die just as quickly as any lesser tank. And it’s the tanks that seem to dominate the action in this campaign so far, with little to see of the infantry and nothing so far of air or artillery support; new challenges which I’m looking forward to SABOW throwing at me, in due course.

At any rate, I’d had my revenge! This was the most intense and exciting mission I have had so far in SABOW and I’m looking forward to the next clash with a mixture of trepidation and enthusiasm!

 

[33LIMA 972]

PS there is now a demo available; at time of writing, this is of the April 2015 version of SABOW, and the Gamersgate and Steam sales are still on:

 

http://graviteam.com/games/SABOW.html?action=downloads

 

 

The first May update is reported to be coming soon, with additional single missions and other improvements. SABOW is already one serious tanksim, in the same league as Steel Beasts in my experience and highly recommended to anyone with a serious interest in this genre.