Wing Leader: Third Time's the Charm

 

Off we go to snowy Russia, for an attempt by the Luftwaffe to deliver supplies to the surrounded German 6th Army. Two wings of He-111s are trying to fly in food, ammo, and medical supplies with escort provided by a flight of Bf-109F-4s. The German escorts are few, but they're both Veteran and include an Experte flyer.

Facing (or tailing) the German relief flight are two full squadrons of Russian Yak-1 fighters. There's lots of them, but they are all Green. And the Germans are close to their destination when the interceptors arrive. The Russians either have to chase the Germans all the way or take a head-on shot to begin with and then flip around and chase.

The first time I played this I did SO MANY THINGS wrong that I scrapped the playing (I set up the escort 109s stupidly, but I also treated the German bomber flights like squadrons and the Russian fighter squadrons like flights, etc.)

This is the first scenario that actually uses fighter in a true escort mission and so allows the players to test out the escort reaction mechanism. It also features Dense Cloud for the first time, which is important because any interceptors or escorts flying higher than 3 (the bombers start flying at 1) literally will not be able to see anything to shoot at or even chase. The Sun direction is more or less meaningless too; no one can see the Sun through all that Dense Cloud. Both sides' fighters have radio nets, and the Soviets have GCI to help get them on target.

Incidentally, I went hunting on BGG as I played and got confirmation from the designer that the "radio clutter" rule only applies in the Tally phase to a/c in dogfights. The modifier for combat "this turn" only applies to placing vectors in the Admin phase.

I still made one error that I can see right off, placing the transport bombers at 2 instead of 1. It might have give the Russians one Dive bonus for one turn, but it's a minor error.

Nothing like that of the Russian Alpha squadron, which failed to tally the bomber transports rushing straight toward them and circled, hoping they would see them as they passed (they did). The Yak Baker squadron took a long shot and tried tallying the escort...and succeeded! They hoped to keep those Fritzes busy while Alpha jumped the first batch of resupply a/c. 

Didn't quite work. The 109s blew past them after an exchange of gunfire and tallied the Yaks that were now trailing the transports, blazing away without hitting much.

OK, thought Baker squadron; we'll hit the tail-end transports. Well, they engaged them, but did no appreciable damage. The 109 star pilots chased off the Alpha Yaks, shooting down one in the process. Then they came after Baker.

Baker's pilots sprayed bullets all over the sky near the Heinkels, but not in any of the parts of sky the Heinkels actually physically occupied. When the Freiderichs showed up, the Experte took down another Yak, and that was all that Baker squadron needed to justify calling it a day.

The Germans ended up with 8 VPs, the Russians none. Vasily Stalin must have been in charge of this air operation!

Next time, we travel to Kent to view The Few take on the Dastardly Hun!