By Howard West
Photos By Rich Baier, and Michael Schwille
Videos By Donald Skovira
In the Greater Pittsburgh and Western PA area we have several groups of players that play Flames of War and Team Yankee at geographically dispersed stores and the players seldom get together other than for tournaments. So after reading about how other groups have run escalation leagues we decided to try a Team Yankee Escalation League here in Western PA.
By Howard West
The premise behind is a miniatures wargame from Battlefront Miniatures is to be able to re-fight the battles of the Cold War that did not really happen. If you define the Cold War that did not happen as armed conflict between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact Allies versus the NATO countries of Western Europe and the United States and Canada. Then the Cold War did not happen. The 1980s and into the early 1990s it was not a peaceful time, as various armed conflicts existed thru out the time frame of the Team Yankee Rule set. With Version 2 of Team Yankee 15 countries armed forces are represented covering some of the major countries of the Middle East, Soviet Union and the three largest Warsaw Pact Allies, and the six larger countries NATO.
Many of the 15 countries covered under Team Yankee V2 participated in the following wars or armed conflicts: The 1982 War in Lebanon, The Iran and Iraq War, The Soviet Afghan War, The Falklands War, The First Persian Gulf War. Some of the wars that occurred before the 1980s are also covered by Battle Front Miniatures in their and rules sets. So at the minimum the time frame covered by Team Yankee was at least pretty warm if not hot.
By Tom Burgess,
My friend Charles and I recently met up to have another go at a Firestorm Gazala campaign. We had played a game, in Turn,One of the Campaign, where Charles’s Panzers managed to break up my British Motor Company and Crusader force. See that AAR . After breaking my reinforcing Crusaders and destroying all of my Anti-tank guns, his Panzers had free reign to take down my defending infantry.
Charles hoped to keep that momentum going for our next Turn Two battle. This made a lot of sense since Charles was effectively just continuing the attack northward with the 5th Panzer Regiment. So he chose to play Battle One from Turn One at El Edem (B6). This area was just to the south of Tobruk (see inset map).
Knowing I would be facing a mostly tank force, I based my defending force off of a British Rifle Company, with maxed out 6 pdrs. I also beefed up my Crusaders with a Grant Troop to assist the Firestorm Grant unit already provided from the campaign scenario. I was very glad to have two Grant Troops as my Crusaders fared very poorly against Panzers in our last battle. Charles force was very similar to our last battle, but he did swap in a full unit of Panzer-IIINs to get some higher firepower.
