Their Finest Hour...

As the scattered paratroopers of the 505th, lead by Staff Sgt. Willems, hunkered down into their defensive positions within the town of St. Mere-Eglise, a strange uncertainty fell over their otherwise upbeat morale. Anything was better than the beaches of Normandy, but the ease in which Carentan was taken gave them doubts about the German war machine. Certainly, many feared what they felt was an almost compulsory counter initiative.

EEERRRrrrrrrr-KAaaa-BOOSH!

Artillery fire poured suddenly in from the south. The men pushed all the air out of their lungs and readied their M1919A4 machine gun nests. Their suspicions were right and now they were in for hell from an implacable German barrage. Obersturmfűrher Wengler had ominously arrived with a platoon of Wehrmact from the 91st Division, approaching through the concealed bocage of the countryside surrounding St. Mere-Eglise. The verisimilitude of the situation was that of an inevitable onslaught.

To make things worse, it appeared that a StuG IIIG and a Marder I armored transport had appeared on the road to the East as well. Fortunately enough for the Americans, Snipers had been set up in the wheat fields along the advancing enemy position as well as the town’s Church tower. As a glider squad, shot down by anti-aircraft fire, collided into hedgerows in the west of town miraculously unharmed, the Yanks felt the odds start to shift a bit in their favor.

Little would the Germans know how tenacious the red, white, and blue would be when cornered…

Well, Jon and I finally got in a game of LNL: BOH! The game is all that it says it is - the fun and excitement a wargame provides without the rules clutter and heavy time requirements. The hero system and impulse driven gameplay make both players constantly involved in the scenario. There’s also enough dice injected in to make the game less deterministic, like most Grognard games, and more chaotic like actual war (although Jon was doing his best to disprove statistics with his constantly horrid throws). I can’t speak highly enough about the genius and simplicity of the module. –And it’s pretty to boot, which is a sort of oxymoron for a wargame.

I can’t wait for the next clash of arms in the Western Front.