Fort Nibeiwa here, sorry to report but were under attack.

So, time for the next battle in the Western Desert book, after the raiding in the night, this time the British were attacking Fort Nibeiwa to take it from Italian hands. To keep the Brits out, I was taking four squads of troops, plus a fifth of elite Bersaglieri men. These were backed up with machine guns, a mortar and an Elefantino Anti-tank rifle These were accompanied, by an M13/39.

As Terry was trying to break in, and capture two objectives, I deployed two squads, one on each building, and then did my best to split the rest evenly around the two buildings. I deployed the Mortar and Elefantino on top of the buildings, given a good line of sight. The tank went in the middle.

Finally, before the game began, Terry rolled for his preliminary bombardment, for the most part, most of my units took some pins. Worse, my freshly painted mortar team was obliterated before the game had even “officially began”.

With that, the game began.

Turn 1 to 3:

Now, the first three turns were interesting, we were playing a dawn raid and we had to roll, each turn to see if the sun had risen, and we were able to see each other. If the roll failed, we would then be using the night fight rules.

Well, for three turns, I spent most of the time trying to remove pin markers, which the Machine Gun team failed for several turns, whilst Terry crept forward and got ready to break through the perimeter wall.

He did, this in two places. On the left, a Matilda 2, the queen of the desert, came charging through, destroying the wall. On the other side, the walls were broken down by a team of engineers. 

Turns 4 to 7:

With the walls breached, the British squads came charging through. Sadly for me, though I had put up a spirited defense, my dice were not really not rolling well. For the most part, most armies were filled with normal rated men, but I could not roll higher than a three to hit, wound, even in combat. 

However, there were some highlights, Terry had an artillery officer, who managed to miscalculate and landed a shell on his own troops. Again, I was only able to kill one or two, of them. The Elefantino gun was able to score the scalp of the Matilda. 

But in the end, Terry’s weight of numbers was able to grind out a victory, as he contested both buildings, and I had barley damaged his army, whilst he had wiped my army out. 

It’s soon my turn to attack Fort Nibeiwa, and I’m wondering if I can take two platoons with truck-mounted squads and a couple of Matildas. We shall see.