Propaganda Victory Lodi 1796

^{Battle of Lodi,10 May 1796 by Louis-François Lejeune}

The battle that took place on 10 May 1796 at Lodi is quite famous. However, only a few troops are involved, so it should be possible to play through this encounter quickly. OSG has published this battle in its title Bonaparte in the Quadritaleral and has included its own small map there.

Fleurus 1794

^{General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan at the Battle of Fleurus 1794}

The Battle of Fleurus 1794 is one of the few battles included by OSG’s The Library of Napoleonic Battles from the period of the French Revolutionary Wars. It is set on the southernmost maps of the Waterloo campaign (Napoleon’s last Gamble S and SX) and has a surprisingly large footprint. The battlefield stretches from Monceau sur Sombre to Fleurus, places that are about 14 km apart. It is not the narrow battlefield of Waterloo, but an area of operations where many interconnected battles took place on 26 June 1794.

Fog and rain at mountains’ foot

Instead of overrunning, the French marched through Piedmont in fog, heavy rain and mud. OSG has produced Bonaparte Overruns Piedmont, a publication that focuses on the earliest campaign in which Napoleon Bonaparte was in supreme command of all French troops in the theatre. The Campaign of Piedmont, designed to break the small Duchy out of the 1^st Coalition against France, took place from 10 to 21 April 1796 and ended in a brilliant French victory. The edition covers the battles of Montenotte on 12 April to Mondovi on 21 April 1796.

^{The defense of monte Legino 10 April 1796}

U-28’s Feindfahrt

The exhibition on the Pula naval base that I visited at Fort Verudela also included a section on submarine warfare in the Mediterranean. This spurs me on to continue spinning the story of U-28, which I had already started in 2020. As we recall, in Sept 1939, Kapitänleutnant Günter Kuhnke was her commander. So far, the captain and his ship have completed three successful patrols and sunk a total of 45,400 GRT of enemy cargo ships. So far, U-28 has been lucky in many ways: it has not been damaged and a considerable number of enemy ships have been sunk.

^{German submarine model in the Fort Veredula naval exhibition.}

Salerno 43

^{The Allied landing forces are ready for the assault on the beach.}

At the end of July, Sven and I had a friendly game with Salerno ’43 by GMT. The game is about Operation Avalanche, the first Allied attempt to take the German lines of retreat in southern Italy by surprise. We both like the Simonitch ‘4X non-series games and were curious to see how ZOC bonds would work in mountainous terrain. I played the Allied side, aka US General Clark’s 5th Army. Sven took the German side, i.e. German Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s 10. Armee.