Ahhh, tanks. Everyone loves them, and with the new Armoured Platoons in Third Edition, it’s never been easier to field a force packed with armoured vehicles.
While not inherently game-winning in their own right (you need infantry to take those objectives, after all), enemy tanks driving around the battlefield unimpeded can seriously interfere with the business of winning, and be a real obstacle for your carefully laid masterplan! It is therefore imperative that you have some way of dealing with enemy armour – fortunately, there are a great number of tools available to help you do this. Let’s take a look at them, and the best way to use them! To keep things simple, I’ve grouped them into several classes of broadly similar weapons.
Before we look at weaponry, however, it’s important to understand exactly what sort of armoured beasts we’re going to have to deal with! We’ll be using a pair of example tanks for this article, both Regular Mediums with a Damage Value of 9+, mounting a pair of Medium Machine Guns (one in the forward hull, one co-axial), and a Heavy Anti-Tank Gun in each turret. That’s right, they’re Panzer IV Ausf. Hs… or T-34/85s… or ‘Easy Eights’… it doesn’t get much more ‘everyman’ than that! These are exactly the kind of vehicles you can expect to see in a great many lists, costing around 225 points each and providing good service on the battlefield. Some players may well go lighter or heavier, cheaper or more expensive, and mix-and-match the vehicles in their Armoured Platoons, but let’s strategise against the median rather than the outliers!
The first category of weapon we’ll look at for dealing with our hypothetical tanks is the most obvious – the anti-tank gun! Historically, these were (of course) the go-to weapon for dealing with enemy armour throughout the Second World War, and come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and calibres. In Bolt Action, we abstract this by categorising them as Light, Medium, Heavy, or Super-Heavy, and we can field 1-4 of them per Artillery Platoon. Just this bit of information gives us one way to counter Armoured Platoons more effectively – if our opponent is going to bring multiple tanks, we’d better bring multiple anti-tank weapons! Remember the useful mantra: “If it’s nice, take it twice!”.
With an anti-tank gun, we’re really looking for one shot, one kill – beating the tank’s 9+ Damage Value and rolling a 4+ on the Full Damage table. Sounds easy, right? Let’s give ourselves a Medium AT gun to fire at the enemy tanks – a British 6pdr will do nicely. We can see that it has a Penetration value of +5, and a 60” range, meaning that it won’t suffer the -1 to Penetration for long range inside 30” – plenty of range to play with!As a bona fide AT gun, our 6pdr also receives +1 to hit when shooting at vehicles, meaning under normal conditions we’ll be looking for a 3+ to hit. After all that maths, we can see that, assuming we hit, we’ll be looking at a 4+ to deal Superficial Damage to the front armour of the enemy Medium Tank, or a 5+ to penetrate and do Full Damage. I’m not sure I like those odds so much!
While we can of course get a better chance of a kill by increasing the number and size of guns in our force, that can start to get expensive, and for the points-conscious among us can be a no-go. Instead, let’s look at some of the ways we can use our Medium AT gun cannily to improve our chances of success!
The most obvious way to do this is to avoid taking shots at the thicker front armour – aim for the sides, or even better the rear, and reap those Penetration bonuses – this is doubly true if you can somehow take the shot at point-blank range! Of course, your opponent probably isn’t going to be so obliging as to put their tank in such a vulnerable situation, so we’ll have to… encourage them somewhat. This is where ‘playing the table’ comes in handy. You’ll want to study the table carefully during deployment and identify where you think your opponent is likely to want to deploy and move their tank – to an extent you can influence this with your deployment, particularly if you have a tank of your own – and from there extrapolate the best firing positions for your gun.
For example, if there is a natural bottleneck that enemy tanks must pass through in a certain orientation, then a position flanking that location is an ideal spot for an anti-tank gun. Similarly, try to avoid siting your gun in a position where it can quickly lose sight of its target – nobody likes having to reposition instead of shooting! Wait until the range is right (ideally inside half-range to avoid the negative Penetration modifier), and as soon as you see a vulnerable spot, open fire! Ambush orders can be exceptionally useful for this, as they allow you to pick exactly when during an opponent’s move you take the shot. Remember, though – no matter how much you stack the odds in your favour, only the dice gods can save you from a dreaded ‘1’!
I want to very quickly touch on tanks as an anti-tank weapon at this point – they can indeed be one of the most potent options available, but tank-on-tank combat has its own intricacies, and really deserves an article of its own – so we’ll revisit this separately!
The next set of anti-tank equipment we’re going to discuss is a bit of a catch-all – infantry anti-tank weapons. These range from Molotov Cocktails and other improvised grenades, all the way through anti-tank rifles, up to high-tech shaped-charge rocket launchers, and most armies can field a bewildering array of them in their Rifle and Heavy Weapons Platoons!
Anti-tank grenades are their own beast, as they make it much more likely that assaulting a vehicle will succeed, but don’t actually add any weapon-related bonus. Assaulting vehicles can be useful in a pinch, but I would never rely on them as my primary anti-tank option – they’re more of a ‘last ditch’ weapon! A unit with AT grenades is nice to have, but if I need to find 20 points somewhere in my army list, then they’re often the first bit of kit I ‘cut’. Far more useful (for my money) are the ranged options, which fall into two sub-categories – squad-based, and standalone teams.
The gold standard of the squad-based infantry AT weapon is of course the legendary German Panzerfaust, available to several nations through capture or supply. With only a 12″ maximum range, these weapons are really designed for point-blank use, particularly since you only get one shot per game with them! They pack the same punch as a heavy AT gun, however, which means that a smart tanker will stay well away from your infantry. I’m an enormous fan of including one or two per squad where possible, simply as an insurance policy. They can also make great surprise weapons – nobody ever seems to expect those desperate Volksgrenadiers to jump out of their foxholes and take a run at that IS-2, but if they manage to hit, the Soviet tank could be in for a world of hurt! For 15 points, the ability to take a 300-plus-point armoured behemoth out of the game is not to be sniffed at!
Larger infantry AT weapons tend to be fielded as two-man teams – the iconic Bazooka and very similar Panzerschreck are good examples of this. Think of them like a Panzerfaust with twice the range, and you’re about there! These can be used much more to ‘hunt’ tanks than to discourage them, as the extended range combined with Shaped Charge means they can reach out and touch the target without unduly exposing themselves. Usually costing around 60-85 points per team, they are the perfect choice to employ the principles we talked about in the AT gun section – get around to the vulnerable sides or rear of the enemy tank, and let fly – while taking advantage of their standard infantry mobility.
There are also the Anti-Tank Rifles – these weapons were mostly obsolete by the mid-war period, but still have their utility on the Bolt Action tabletop. With a Penetration of only +2, they aren’t likely to trouble our hypothetical Medium tank overmuch, but what they can do is put pin markers on – which brings us nicely to our next point!
You don’t always need to penetrate a tank’s armour to kill it!Remember, effective hits mean pin markers, whether from HE or anti-tank weaponry. I have very strong views on pins – they mean wins!While we would need to put 9 pin markers on the tank to make the crew bail out wholesale, which is a little unlikely, what we can do is pin it into a situation where it can’t really do anything other than Rally – I find four or five markers does the trick. Remember that a vehicle that fails an order check is going backwards as fast as it can, and if it reaches the table edge, it’s gone, gone, gone! If your opponent is foolish enough to expose their vehicle, let fly with anything that can pin it – provided that this doesn’t compromise your other plans; a cunning opponent can use the threat of a vehicle to distract your heavy firepower.A tank that spends all its time rallying is about as much use as no tank at all, though, so always consider attempting to pin if you get the opportunity.
The final word in anti-armour psychological warfare is, of course, the flamethrower. Applying pin markers, and forcing an immediate morale check to survive, the flamethrower is arguably the single most efficient way to remove a tank… provided it can get close enough! It always pays to remember that they’ll be Public Enemy Number One as soon as they appear on the table, so you may have to get a bit canny with how you deploy them!
With these guidelines, you should have everything you need to kill the ‘average’ tank – you can adjust the strategy as needs be when facing smaller or larger armoured vehicles, and to suit your points budget and taste. There’s no need to be cowed by enemy armour – fight smart, keep your nerve, and pray to the dice gods, and you can come out on top!
