Turn 24:
Holy moly. Jeremy sends me a really devastating turn - he launches an airborne operation to cut off several brigades (looks like 9 in total plus the Marine division) that were still south of the Tennessee river. I’m kind of baffled at how the paras were able to make it through all the Allied fighter cover around Boston, as I’m pretty sure that’s where 3 of the 4 paratrooper divisions came from, and they all appear to have made it (maybe he shipped them south a turn or two ago and I didn’t notice...I’d been trying to keep tabs on them but might have forgotten). But, make it they did, and Jeremy also has more units roaming around the south than I had spotted with my theater recon. I’m pretty sure all of these units are dead, and it has me kicking myself for not railing more of them out of there. There were some that had to walk as they weren’t fortified on rail lines, but since most of the eastern side of the Mississippi is a rail line, most of these units could have railed to safety. I wanted to blow some bridges and I guess that’s why I didn’t do it, but mostly, I just thought they were completely safe...and it turns out they weren’t. Not by a longshot. And now I’ll pay the price for my mistake.
Otherwise things are relatively as expected. Jeremy informs me that he did have another engineer on the Missouri river, so the bridgehead is not cut from supply, but the Axis are in rather desperate circumstances there I should think. Some Italians have shown up at Albequerque, but I have a few fortified Mexican units in the area as I’d spotted the broken rail lines branching towards the city a long time ago.
My first priority is to ensure that the Axis can’t just surge across the Tennessee. I also ship some more units to defend the Missouri line and St. Louis, as this area is all very lightly guarded and it’s a place where I could potentially lose the game. So, a few units trickle away from the southeast front and Boston to shore those areas up. The units south of the Tennessee are all dead, as I just can’t see a way to save them, so the ones that can run away do in order to blow more bridges and make a nuisance of themselves before dying (Jeremy has taken the last supply point down here, so they’re going to die off on their own in short order).
In the West, I think Jeremy either didn’t see or just couldn’t react to the units I railed directly to the west of Omaha, and I’m moving in to try and finish off that bridgehead and nab as much as I can.
While the South is a debacle for the Allies, the West is a debacle for the Axis. The Omaha bridgehead is shrunk significantly this turn, and my troops coming around from the west do, I believe, now cut supply to the pocket. I just hope I can wrap this up in time to get these forces back down to the area southeast of St. Louis, where I think they will soon be needed. Otherwise, the same local counterattacks around Boston that have been going on for ages now. Jeremy catches a bit of a break as most of Bomber Command is still reorganizing, as it was last turn. The Allied air force is big, but they sure do like to take frequent breaks.
The Western front, where I am having dreams of crushing a dozen or more German divisions in a large encirclement: