Short and sweet!

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Platoon Patrol 17: Dutch Mech in YPRs

Welcome back to Combat Mission Shock Force 2 for the 17th and final Platoon Patrol scenario. Last up are the Dutch Mechanised infantry in YPR-765s. In keeping with the usual standard of taking the best options available, they’re using the YPRs with the explosive reactive armour package.

They’re here to find and destroy a reinforced squad of US Marines in one of four locations on our map and they’re starting from one of six randomly determined entry points, in this case Entry Point 1 on the northern map edge.

Contact

There’s no messing around trying to find the Marines in this one: they’re at Bravo and they reveal themselves on the first turn. I’ve rushed the platoon off into some dead ground just to the left of the deployment zone and kicked 4th squad out to get eyes on the Bravo hillside.

That earns them some incoming fire from the Marines and three contact icons off the bat.

4th’s YPR returns fire and I start dismounting some of the other squads to free up their vehicles to get stuck in. I’m actually in a very good position here, behind a slope I can use to get hull down and engage Bravo, but I want the infantry away from the vehicles in case those SMAW gunners get lucky.

4th shuts down the initial contact in a torrent of 25mm cannon fire- so much, in fact, that I’m starting to get worried about its ammunition consumption. I’ve been using 30 second target briefly orders to hit the Marine contact icons and evidently they’re far too long.

The Marines come back for more after a brief pause. I’ve sidestepped 4th‘s dismounts into the adjacent woodland where they can hopefully get eyes on the enemy with more concealment. 4A takes a couple of non-fatal hits from a new contact, which 2nd’s YPR proceeds to shoot up with its cannon.

I’m already starting to move. 3rd squad have gone forward into a dip to get closer to Bravo, while the platoon HQ squad has gone wide left to some high ground. My plan is to maintain a base of fire with 2nd and 4th in the rear, while 3rd exploits the dead ground in the centre to move in and draw fire and 1st hold a position up on the left where they can enfilade the Bravo woods.

This approach nets a couple more spots- one out on the far right of Bravo and the Marine platoon HQ on the left side- both of which are quickly shut down.

After only ten minutes or so it looks like the facing side of Bravo is, if not clear, not putting up a lot of resistance. That hillside has eaten a lot of cannon fire and it’s not shooting back, so I decide to bring 2nd up to the left and start to sweep along the line of the ridge to clear it.

Losing the YPR

Extending 2nd to the left of 1st reveals another enemy contact on the other side of the Bravo crest. I haven’t spotted any of the SMAW teams up until this point, so chances are this is one and I want to deal with it quickly.

Of course, it really is one of the SMAWs. Just before 1st’s YPR can engage a rocket comes the other way. Luckily, this impacts on the front slope ERA and gets neutralised. The YPR opens up with the pre-ordered area fire and looks like it gets a burst or two on target, though the gunner manages to spot the offending SMAW gunner and confirm he survived.

The YPR follows up directly with its coax, but this fails to dissuade the Marine, who gets a second rocket off. This hits the YPR in the lower front slope- below the ERA blocks- and instantly destroys it, killing all three crew.

That’s… unfortunate. The first rocket hit just at the start of the turn, which means that the TacAI for 1st’s YPR was going to be on its own for a whole minute before I could intervene. The TacAI could have popped smoke or reversed out of sight behind the crest it was on… but the pixeltruppen chose to duke it out and paid the penalty.

This does not pan out well for the Marines though. I’d sent 2nd’s YPR further left at the same time to get another angle and they blow the SMAW team away on the next turn.

While all that’s being going on, 3rd’s dismounts have moved up through the dead ground in the centre and come under from the remaining Marine in the enemy HQ team. 3A returns fire as their GPMG comes up to support, but I’d already shuffled their YPR right and that gets the job done.

Mopping Up

Things go very quiet after this. 3rd Squad is sitting in the open, overlooked by the entire facing hillside and nobody is shooting at them so it’s probably clear.

I send them into the woods where they link up with 2nd and the two squads slowly and carefully sweep through the woods from left to right, under the watchful gaze of the supporting YPRs.

They regain contact at the far end of Bravo after about ten minutes. There’s a burst of small arms fire and a huge explosion. That’s actually a thermobaric rocket from a SMAW getting intercepted by a tree trunk. This pins both teams from 3rd, who are closest, and I don’t have any kind of contact icon, so I get 3rd and 4th’s YPRs to shoot up the general area the fire came from and swing 2nd round from the left.

3A take a casualty, as do 2B as they come over the crest, but the dismounts finally spot a Marine. He doesn’t last long after that and everything goes quiet again. Closing in, it seems like this was the 2nd SMAW team and now that both pixeltruppen in the team are out of action it’s time to ceasefire.

Endex

This was a pretty short and sweet run, though not the smoothest. All the Marines are accounted for and the objective seized, but the Dutch lost one of their YPRs and 5 men in the process- 2 dismounts and 3 crew. That gives them an overall score of 864 points, placing them between the Canadians in Nyalas and the Dutch light infantry in G-Wagens.

As always: the score is entirely arbitrary and losing a vehicle puts a dent in it very quickly. If we disregard the loss of the YPR, this platoon only took two casualties mopping up at the end, which is a very strong performance.

And like I mentioned a minute ago, that YPR getting SMAW’d was unlucky on a few counts. If the first rocket had hit a couple of seconds earlier, it would have been at the very end of the previous turn and I would have been able to issue the orders to do all the things I wanted the YPR’s TacAI to do: pop smoke, reverse away and not hang around waiting to get hit again. Even in the event, the YPR did get accurate 25mm and coax fire onto the SMAW team, the Marines just had high enough soft-factors to mitigate it. Less capable troops would probably have been much more effectively suppressed.

Particularly annoyingly, the vehicle had been in that position for a while, along with 1st squad, which had plenty of additional spotting potential. It seems like both the Marines and the Dutch spotted each other at about the same time, after they’d been in line of sight for a few minutes.

Despite that, I think it’s clear that the overall setup here was a very good match for the YPR platoon’s capabilities. We’ve seen before at Objective Alpha how enemy infantry teams on a forward slope are liable to get wrecked in short order when they try to face down a platoon with automatic cannon. This was no different.

The dismounts accounted for one Marine: the last one right at the end. The YPRs got the rest. 4th squad’s YPR, the one that used up about three quarters of it’s HE-I hitting contacts with area fire in the first couple of minutes ultimately racked up 10 of the 19 kills.

My only problem with the YPRs- suicidal pixel-crewmen aside- is their ammunition load. 3rd and 4th’s YPRs, the ones which spent the whole battle in the base of fire role facing the Bravo hillside, are almost out of high-explosive-incendiary ammo. 3rd’s vehicle is completely dry, 4th’s has 6 rounds left. The other remaining YPR, 2nd’s, only has 97 left as well, so it’s not like even crossdecking ammo from the surviving vehicles would help all that much if they had to continue the fight.

Those 25mm cannons were very effective, but they do need a lot of gun-food.

Conclusion

So this was very much a ‘firepower first’ run. The only way it could have been easier would have been if the Marines were all on the facing slope… as it was, this went almost as smoothly as it could have done and as usual, there’s less to say when things go well.

That is the last Platoon Patrol run though. We’ve put 17 platoons through our scenario so we’ve got a good base to draw some conclusions from, which is what we’re going to be doing in the next video. I don’t think anything will come up that is a complete surprise to anyone who’s been following this closely, but we’ll see.

So, hope you all found this fun and interesting. 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.