Confessions of a sinner – German EW cavalry

Today, Coxer gets ON his high horse and looks at German cavalry.

So here is my latest list, but the first question is ‘why?’; because I can tell you now, if  painting infantry makes me miserable, painting cavalry makes me very very miserable.

Well the answer is simple in some ways, the list looked good!

Way back when I started this project in June I said I wanted to do infantry, mech and tanks. The tanks were the passion of the project and I love them! Infantry was a natural evolution, and my original idea had been to use SdKfz 250’s for mech, but I couldn’t do a list I liked.   I tried not only ‘Barbarossa’ armoured rifles, but the light pioneers, and even their equivalents in ‘Blitzkrieg’ and ‘Hellfire and Back’ (note:  I’m not insane, so no motorcycles!) but none appealed.

Then I saw the cavalry – and it just clicked… so I sold my half tracks (and Tigers, too) to fund these guys – I’ve another post reviewing the Skytrex models, but here’s the list breakdown.

So back to the real why of this list – what sets it above other German mech lists? The answer is being able to attack infantry and defend against tanks!

Attacking infantry is always important, and this list has options here!

Firstly let’s look at cavalry with these rules; It’s fast, mobile and infantry/guns don’t want to break off against them! It also just looks plain awesome having these chaps charging.

But the mobility also comes in useful in other missions too, such as Breakthrough or Counter-attack where, as the defender, you need to get to the objectives. And in half on/off missions you can easily reinforce a weak point with these guys too.

Oh and you have a magic panzerknacker- just a shame there were not enough points for the IC and 2IC to have one too!

Another option you need in attack is recon, to push back ambushes or lift GtG. In this list I have once again used the trusty captured Panhard; with good mobility and a decent gun, these are a really great option.

An essential on attack is smoke, the easy option in this list is mortars, 4 of those offer a great double template, and if needed on attack can dig out infantry.

The other option here is in the artillery section – it also gives one of those unique units the 7.5cm FK18.  I’ll do a whole article on these, but the key rule here is ‘horse artillery’ allowing them to assist in attack not only by dropping smoke but also in direct fire. And in defence who doesn’t like 8 AT8 FP3+ shots?

Speaking of which, defending versus tanks – how do 6 Pak38’s sound? That’s 18 AT9 shots, ouch! Just wish I had enough points for transports.

Finally need an 8th platoon, and the easy option is some infantry guns to fill it out.

So there you have it. I think this is a very tidy little list got a couple of games lined up which I’ll try to bring as an AAR to show off the list.