Enfilade 2019 pt 2 Saturday Morning - Battle for Dresden GdC

Saturday Morning has the big battle of napoleonics that Doug organizes every year. There is a pretty usual roster of guys who agree to paint parts of the OOB in order to guarantee a spot at the game. There's usually another 2-6 commands for those who haven't painted a force. This year Ian and Craig (?? I'm gapping on his name) BoB were late to arrive and didn't have a game to play so they took over the Russians and Prussians facing my forces on the french left flank.

Dresden sees the allies trapping a large french army and preparing to crush it with numbers. Suddenly Napoleon shows up and throws the allied command into indecision about whether to attack or not (the plan to attack everywhere that Napoleon wasn't had been agreed upon earlier). It sounds as though the attack went in as there wasn't enough time/organization to stop it.....but the allies held back a huge amount of their forces. Good for ensuring a french victory historically.

My commands were the old guard under mortier and the young guard under Ney.  Terrible command rolls saw my old guard barely able to move their infantry forward regularly with the artillery left far behind and the cav trailing. Ian decided to retrograde his Russians IMMEDIATELY and pin his defense on a village and a lone cannon. It was a solid decision. He joked that his commander, Wittgenstein,  was a German so he really did win even if he lost all his Russian troops.


The french had some redoubts in the centre with some thin staffing in troops, and a crushing advantage on the right flank past the unfordable creek. It was one of those sufficiently large games it's hard to keep track of what all is happening, but the Austrian tide was cresting the redoubts at one point and I was wondering if we'd lose the game about midway through. 




Pic to the right shows the Old Guard steadily marching at the rapidly backpedalling Russians in the foreground.

We can see above and to the left, the Young Guard advanced too impetuously (this was the commander/my mistake rather than a rules thing). They came under cannon bombardment and decided to double down with their advance. St Cyr moved up to help protect their flank....eventually. It ended up being a gruelling melee disaster.  

Above we see the allies closing in on the french and most of the french advance is on the flanks. 

 To the right the YG ended up losing a fairly promising melee on their own turn.....and retreated to expose the stand that was protecting their flank. This was the start of endless flank attacks on flanks exposed by successful and unsuccessful attacks. It gained its own rationale as you'd be silly not to flank attack......One sees how battles can run out of commanders controls very easily.

The YG miraculously managed a lot of tight morale checks to stay in the game. The Prussians main effort was against them allowing St Cyr to help a bit with the Austrian effort against the redoubts. 

Down to 2 units the YG continue to advance and hit some guns (Audacity, more audacity, always audacity). The game was getting late and everyones morale was pretty brittle. I was attempting to force the issue and create another check......which didn't happen. The supporting infantry unit closed the door on the flank and another YG unit disappears. 

 .... this opened yet another flank attack which (after a tough morale check) the YG pursued.

The OG managed to destroy a few Russian units by this point and get their red lancers in for a single combat. Very much true to history the OG did a lot of marching and not a lot of dying in this game.

Last pic we see the tattered remnants of the french army that has seen off the allies. Not in much of a position to take advantage of their victory we decided it was a historical french minor victory result.

A fun, and good looking, game as always.