Well, this is the first time we start from Entry Point 3 and the first time the Marines are waited for us at Bravo.

I'm kind of glad I haven't had to tackle Bravo before, it's a tough one. I guess some of the higher end platoons would be able to mangle the enemy if they're on the forward slope, but someone still has to go in the wood and check...

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Platoon Patrol 15: Canadian Rifles in Nyalas

Welcome back to Combat Mission Shock Force 2 and the 15th instalment of the Platoon Patrol series. This time Canadian rifle infantry in Nyala MRAPs are up. I’ll leave links to the quicks guides for the Nyala and the dismounts down below. After much deliberation, I decided to go for the Nyala variant fitted with the remote weapon system instead of the .50 cal. With the Nyalas basically being battle taxis and losing all their firepower when the infantry get out, I think the RWS is a better option here.

As usual, our Canadians are here to find and destroy a reinforced squad of US Marines in one of four locations on our map. They’re going to be set up in objective A, B, C or E. Complementing that randomness, we’ll be starting from a random entry point as well. This time I finally rolled up a 3, so we’re starting in the eastern map edge opposite Objective Echo.

Kick Off

Not only is this run a first because we’re starting from Entry Point 3, it’s a first because after finding Echo, Charlie and Alpha empty the Marines must be at Bravo.

Unlike the other objectives, Bravo isn’t some kind of farm compound, it’s a wooded hillside. We’ve been there plenty of times, but never fought over it and it presents a different kind of challenge.

Crossing the highway ditch from Alpha brings the platoon into a corner of the road that’s screened by a wood. I still don’t have any actual contact with the enemy, so I dismount 1st and 2nd Sections and send them into the wood to try and get eyes on the hillside.

This is less effective than I would like. I have to decide whether my troops are not seeing anything because there’s nothing on the facing chunk of Bravo hillside or because the Marines are well concealed. Adding to the problem, the ground between my Canadians and Bravo is not flat- in particular, there’s a small rise that masks the closer edge of the Bravo wood from my pixeltruppen when they go prone.

To get around this I order 1st Section’s A team out on the left to leave the wood and start probing forward up the rise ahead to get a better angle and see if they attract any attention.

At the same time, 3rd Section drives off to the right in their Nyala. I know the right side of the Bravo hillside is clear because it’s so open and the shape of the hill makes that area dead ground to any Marines in the woods. There’s a solid avenue of approach there I can use to snurgle some infantry forward.

And with that, we’ve got a passable plan. 1st and 2nd will form a base of fire targeting the facing corner of the Bravo wood while 3rd attack over the ridge from the right and mop up at close range. I don’t know whether I’ll need that plan yet though, and I stop 3rd in some cover out on the right to wait until get a better idea of what’s going on.

Contact

They don’t have to wait long. 1A come under fire as they crest the rise. There’s one of the SMAWs and another Marine contact in the treeline facing them. 1A shoot back, but go to ground after a near miss from the SMAW and then take a casualty to 556.

At least I have something to work with. On the next turn, I try to engage with my base of fire, but 1B and 2A are blocked by the rise. 2B gets a Gustaf round off, but there’s only three of them and their C9 SAW can’t get into the fight so they don’t make much of an impact.

1A takes another casualty and drops into a shaken state while I try and shuffle the other teams to the right where they should have better fields of fire. The big problem is that rise and how it messes with prone line of sight. The Marines are about 300m so my Canadians are probably not going to hit anything outside the prone position anyway. If only I had some really tall weapons platforms that could see over the terrain…

To some extent, it was always inevitable that the Nyalas were going to get into the fight. I’ve brought the platoon HQ and XO teams up in their G-Wagens, which they now abandon to hop in the MRAPs and get those RWS mounted C6s into action.

The XO does a better job than the platoon HQ, which attracts a couple of SMAW rockets. Thankfully they don’t connect, but I decided to pop smoke to cover a relocation and I had very intelligently failed to realise that with would blind my entire base of fire for a little while.

At least 1A are able to disengage and rejoin the rest of their section in the trees and the two confirmed enemy positions in the edge of the Bravo wood are definitely masked from 3rd section’s approach by the bulk of the hillside.

First attack: 3rd break in

After taking a few minutes to get into position, time during which the base of fire keeps busy suppressing the Marines, 3rd finally get onto the enemy flank. They line the crest about 50m away and open up.

It’s hard to tell if the fire is all that effective through the trees, but nothing comes back and I start to cautiously manoeuvre 3rd’s teams forward. 3A eventually get some grenades onto the SMAW team and finish them off from about 20 metres.

3B moves in to confirm, which means shifting the supporting fires left onto the other contact. 3rd spot the remaining Marine, who goes down in short order.

That’s the edge of the wood cleared. If I continue advancing through the objective from here my base of fire will be shooting me in the back, so I need to have a quick shuffle about.

1st Section is already two men down, so I decide to shove them into the XO’s Nyala and shift them left to another wood with a better angle on Bravo. They can set up a second base of fire there, keeping my supporting element at right angles to my avenue of attack.

3rd is only 7 men strong and they have a big wood to clear, so I remount 2nd Section and send them to back them up.

Second attack: 2nd and 3rd move to contact

Clearing the wood initiates a familiar chain of events. 2nd lose a man as they crest the Bravo hill to the right of 3rd. Everybody plus the base of fire lights up the general area of the contact, then 3a probes forward and finishes the enemy off while they’re suppressed. This time it was the Marine HQ team, which leaves two rifle teams and a SMAW team out there somewhere.

Given that we’re fighting in woods and my pixeltruppen can barely see past the end of their weapons, I manage to find the remaining three enemy teams at the same time.

1B, down in the base of fire, spots one Marine team on the lower slope around the side of the hill from 3rd. 2nd section is already coming up on the right of 3rd to get on line, which would put them in position to flank the new contact, but they’re straddling the crest and bump into the other two Marine teams at point blank range. 2nd loses three men in one brutal burst of fire.

That’s not great. My initial reaction is to swing in the opposite direction. 2nd isn’t going to be able to flank right onto the lower contact now, but the base of fire is working on it, so maybe 3rd can flank left, deal with them and then come round to attack the Marines up top.

The lower Marines had fired off a rocket of some description at the XO’s Nyala in the base of fire, prompting me to back it off and, whether I was rushing, not thinking or just wasn’t joined up enough, I sent 3rd forward in the wood without the suppressive fire they need.

So 3rd bumps into the Marines, loses two men and then goes to pieces, falling back through the wood.

Third attack: bringing the Nyalas to bear

Stumbling onto small enemy teams in dense terrain and getting a bloody nose is a pretty familiar situation in the platoon patrol. It almost always happens and my usual response is to apply firepower until the problem goes away. Here, the only spare firepower I have lying around are 2nd and 3rd’s Nyalas back on the forward slope and although I’m not keen on getting them into trouble, I don’t really have any other options.

So I bring both G-Wagens and the Platoon HQ up, dismount the drivers to man the Nyalas and send the HQ into the woods to help out the infantry.

With a bit of thought, I do have at least some options with the Nyalas. I send 3rd’s far right, onto a track where they can engage the upper Marines from behind. 2nd’s gets to take a more direct approach. Again, I want to exploit the height of the Nyala and creep it up to the crest at right angles to the enemy where it will hopefully be able to enfilade them with only the RWS peeking over the summit.

This just about works and soon the upper Marine positions are being hosed down with 762. After consolidating the Platoon HQ and 3rd section onto 2nd’s position where they took the contact, I let them spam 556 and hand grenades over the crest before sending them in to mop up.

The Marines are mostly still alive, but they’re seriously suppressed and get finished off in a good minute’s worth of automatic fire and grenades. Kudos to the squad leader who tries to demonstrate that switching to your pistol is faster than reloading.

With them out of the way, I can reorient my infantry to get onto the lower Marines’ flank while I send the Nyalas round to bulk up the base of fire back on the highway. Again, the C6s on the Nyalas suppress while 2nd, 3rd and the Platoon HQ close in and snuff out the last enemy team at close range.

With that, it’s mission complete and time to ceasefire.

Endex

This definitely felt like one of the tougher platoon patrol runs. The Canadian rifles took 9 casualties, but they started off with quite a few men and didn’t lose any of their vehicles so they still get a pretty respectable score of 870. That puts them between the US Marines in AAVs and the Dutch lighting infantry in G-Wagens, but it’s pretty close.

As per usual, the score is arbitrary and potentially very swingy, so what are the big takeaways here?

The Nyalas

I think the most obvious thing is that we’ve seen again how battle taxis… aren’t. It’s one thing to look at a vehicle and say “this is poorly armoured and lightly armed, it should just be used as a transport” and a totally other thing to have a light infantry platoon that has to scrape together as much firepower as possible.

I needed the Nyalas here. Not only did the dismounts find it difficult to suppress the Marines from their base of fire positions- between the lie of the ground and the range they never felt particularly effective- but the wood I was attacking was a big chunk of dense terrain that needed a lot of bodies to clear.

I probably had enough infantry to do one or the other well, not enough to do both simultaneously. So the Nyalas and their GPMGs were really critical for generating the suppressive fire the platoon needed to be able to close with the enemy.

Luckily the Canadian rifles had the Platoon HQ, XO team and two G-Wagen drivers available to man the Nyala’s weapon stations and make it possible to cobble together a mobile fire support element once the rifle sections had dismounted.

And their mobility was really important. There are a lot of situations where support by fire positions need to move to get better angles and the complexity of the terrain around the Bravo hillside meant I ended up with three different bases of fire at different times, all of which were about 500m away from one another. Running an infantry base of fire around like that is tiring and time consuming, if it’s even practical at all. I couldn’t have done it without the Nyalas.

But would they have been better with the .50s instead of the RWS? Maybe. The XO’s Nyala in the base of fire with 1st Section was pretty much out of ammunition by the end of the battle, which means it fired about 2000 rounds. That’s four times as many as it would have had were it mounting a .50 instead of a C6.

So here I think more bullets was a better choice than bigger bullets… but again, this is a really hard call. Why they can’t square the circle and fit the M2 into the RWS and wang another thousand rounds of .50 in the back I don’t know. Budget cuts I guess.

Avenue of Attack

Anyway, this was also the first time we’ve attacked Bravo in the Platoon Patrol. It’s a very different kind of objective and maybe I picked a poor avenue of attack. Maybe there was a way to tackle this without splitting into base of fire and assault elements: in theory I could have sent the entire platoon out right and attacked with everything I had over the crest, mobbing the Marines en masse.

I think that would have been at least as bad as the attack I actually mounted and probably worse. If you saw the BTR platoon run, you’ll know what I think about mass and how terrain and the battlefield conspire to reduce engagements to small, independent chunks.

And the Bravo hillside was absolutely the kind of place that generates fragmented fighting. Not only was it heavily wooded, but the objective area wrapped over and around the contours. In the end, the Canadians fought over three different crests and they only succeeded in all three instances because I had the base of fire suppressing the far side.

Backing that idea up: as usual, almost all my casualties took place in the opening stages of contacts. The Marines got their fire out, scored some hits, then they were either suppressed and the assault element mopped them up, or I disengaged and came back when I had suppressed them. It’s always hard to avoid those ‘don’t tread on me’ losses.

Conclusion

That then, was the Canadian Rifles in Nyala taking on the Platoon Patrol. Definitely a performance that felt worse than it turned out to be. They ultimately slotted into the scoreboard in what feels like a sensible place.

Now that they’re out of the way, we only have two platoons left: British Mechanised in FV432 Bulldogs and Dutch Mechanised in YPR-765s. So it’s down to a choice of which angry metal box you guys want to see first. I’ll leave a link to the deciding poll down below.

In the meantime, hope you all enjoyed this one. If you’d like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.