Hohenstaufen- 9th Reconnaissance Battalion Part I

Adepticon 2016 is right around the corner but due to some personal issues I have had to seriously scale back my participation  this year. This means  No Pirates, No Battle of Kursk , and even the Bolt Action Team Tourney is up in the air right now.  What is happening  for sure is, I will be there gaming Saturday and Sunday for the Bolt Action Nationals,  Hohenstaufen in hand.

Learning my lesson from my defeats at Operation Sting in the Fall and my success at the previous Adepticon  (where we went 2-1 in the team and I went  3-0 in the singles)  Its quite clear about what works well in Bolt Action and what doesn’t , One thing for sure that does not is a 400 point Tank hogging up all your points when most of the time is only  firing 8 MMG shots, which you can get from infantry for about 1/5 of the points…while it sure looked cool, playing it was a real bear.

Fast forward to my current list focusing on my other favorite WW2 force, Viktor Grabner’s, 9^th SS Recon Battalion. Who charged across the Bridge at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden, went down in a blaze of glory and accomplished what I think Grabner  really wanted out of that mission, That we are still talking about him over 70 years later in 2016 and what a huge pair of balls the guy had.  As the story goes, After reconing the British air landings between Arnhem and Nijmegen , Graber was informed of the British capturing the northern end of the Arhmen Bridge,  His unit had been recalled for a reorganizing of forces and a correlated counter attack. However,  Grabner  wanted to take that bridge back very badly, personally.   He cooked  up a plan that by regulation only “serviceable vehicles” had to report back to HQ, so he temporarily disabled   22 of his units best vehicles and sent the rest of force  back the where they were recalled.  Grabner  stayed behind with about half his force, and the following day at dawn quickly put his vehicles back in working order and led them across the Bridge into the famous firefight, in which they suffered a 50% casualty rate, and were forced to retreat,  Grabner losing his life in the exchange.

There is a lot of information on “Grabner’s last ride”, including records of  what all the 40  vehicles present in his unit where , so that is what I drew my list from,   My 1250 point list is  made up of 5 Vehicles , Including Grabner is his Captured British Humber MkIV , and 3 Motorbikes. The entire unit is mounted in vehicles and dismounted it comes to 32 foot models.  Considering the house rules for the Nationals even like Vehicles can still fire, once troops dismount, The force is even better that when I originally came up with it.

The photo above is my Panzer II Luchs and my Kradshutzen Squad of Bikers, , The Luchs is a Recce Vehicle , as well as Grabner’s Humber,  and the Bikers are a small outflanking squad.  Then there are three transports,  a standard Hanomag 251, my SdKfz 7 I made for last year's TT and my new 251/10 Command Half track which sports a Pak 36.  I’ll plenty of pictures up probably the week before Adepticon or earlier as I am in the finishing  stages of the other vehicles now and then have 10 infantry to detail and I am good to go. So I’ll be back for more on Grabner’s Last Ride  soon.