Matrix Games

Operation Barbarossa - After Action Report

“No doubt that would hasten their surrender by undermining their morale, but how exactly do you propose to do this?”

“With my panzers, and a few platoons of good infantry riding in half-tracks and a handful of light artillery pieces – IF the General will allow me to borrow those resources for thirty-six hours.”

“My, you do sound confident, but how do you propose to ambush one of these reinforcement trains without being noticed and shelled to pieces by the Polish guns within the pocket?”

“By following this route and striking them from behind. See these cross-hatch marks on the map? They represent large earthen dikes used for flood control. They’re very study, reinforced with concrete, and have ample room on top for my little tanks as well as the half-tracks full of good infantry I am also begging the General to lend me. We must seal this gap in our siege ring in such a dramatic fashion as to shock the Poles into despair, compel them to surrender rather than continue a hopeless though admittedly gallant resistance.”

“Is this reasonably feasible, Wurstfangler? Are you sure you even CAN drive an armored column that close to the railroad station.”

“Yes, Herr General, because yesterday at twilight I managed to drive a heavily loaded Keubelwagen to within a hundred yards of the passenger platform without a shot being fired at me. It’ll be slower work at night of course, but also safer. The re-supply trains usually arrive between nine and ten at night. I figure the most vivid way to tell the Poles that their little game has been discovered would be a sudden violent ambush, striking at their most sensitive spot!”

“Mmmm, yes; one of those usually does the trick.” muttered Von Bock as he rose to inspect my proposed route on the map with the fierce concentrated gaze of a man making weighty decisions. Suddenly he smacked his hands together and beamed a genuinely bright smile at me.

“By God, I like this scheme of yours! Can you draw up a list of your requirements – weapons, demolitions, specialist troops, that sort of thing – and have it in my hands before three o’clock?”

“I have already taken the liberty of doing so, Herr General.”

I reached into the breast pocket of my tunic and drew fourth a batch of neatly filled-out requisition forms.

“I AM impressed, Wurstfangler. This is the kind of bold, unorthodox thinking the Wehrmacht needs!”

“The Great Train Ambush” (as it rapidly came to be known) became one of the legends of the Polish Campaign. Granted, the Mark I and Mark II tanks were little more than toys compared to the behemoths deployed today. The Mark I had a tiny turret (the tank’s commander also its gunner!) fitted out with two 7.62-mm. machine guns; the Mark II had slightly thicker armor and better guns: a 20 mm cannon mounted coaxially with the same light machine gun. Neither vehicle as intended for heavy tank-vs-tank combat, but they were nimble, reliable, fast, and perfectly capable of knocking out a passenger train at a range of approximately 60 meters. After the first fusillade I led the tanks out of concealment and simply made two back-and-forth passes, driving right on top of a parallel rail track. We shredded the wooden passenger cars and punched numerous holes in the locomotive’s boiler with the 20 mm armor-piercing rounds.

Before we could start our third pass, there were white flag-handkerchiefs waving from the windows of every car. I learned later that there had been 1,508 fresh Polish replacement on that train, and of that number we had killed or seriously wounded almost four hundred men; the remaindered (although I did permit a few older and presumably widely-trusted non-coms escape, knowing they would amplify the story of the ambush in their telling, until it sounded like a military debacle roughly equal to the Sack of Constantinople. All the other Poles surrendered and we just left the steam-screeching locomotive where it was. You could hear the damned thing for miles! When the steam finally blew out and the locomotive became inert once more, we did register some artillery and mortar batteries on it, figuring the Poles would try to move it in some way, because it effectively blocked entrance to or egress from Szymanowski’s pocket. They did make several attempts either to pull the heavy brute out of the way, blow it up into smaller, lighter pieces, or simply push it off the track bed with as pair of armor-plated bulldozers. Ingenious? Yes! Courageous? Yes, right up to the verge of Romantic stupidity! Successful? Not even remotely, and every time they tried a new trick they lost dozens of men. Yet, give them their due, the encircled Polish garrison inside The Pocket fought back furiously and could not be persuaded to put down their arms until 24 hours after Warsaw itself ran up the white flag.

 

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