Prussia in Peril - East Prussia '14 Central Powers AAR - major victory turn 114

[ComradeP]

The strategic dilemma with 2nd Army is that you can pick a converging path for meeting up with 1st Army at some point or a diverging path to try and draw in as many German units as possible to make 1st Army's task easier.

What went wrong for my opponent was the 2nd Army itself ended up converging towards the same location, leaving the flanks vulnerable to encirclement.

After a few rough opening turns drawing fire from units in the pocket, the pocket collapsed more quickly than expected.

The Russian concentration in more or less the same area made the perimeter stronger, but it also greatly reduced the number of hexes I needed to capture. After XX Armeekorps got its own attack going from the north, the pocket was compressed into a small area.

Aside from not blocking some of the bridges with the cavalry units in the area as the pocket was being formed, I don't think any big tactical errors were made. Strategically, the decision to concentrate 2nd Army was the first step on the road to the creation of the pocket, but the pocket itself was still preventable. The Electronic Warfare spotting of Russian corps was very helpful and heavily influenced my decision to send XVII Armeekorps on its own flanking manoeuvre along the Omulew.

The operational decision to hold on to the gains at Neidenburg and to move the corps between Neidenburg and Soldau south-west instead of south was the main Russian operational misjudgement made during the game, as it left no forces in the path of the units moving around the flanks of 2nd Army.

Given the enormous variability the Fix/Release schedule for 1st Army results in, I think 1st Army performed well. It would've faced a serious threat during the counterattack by the units from the Western Front, but I doubt I could've pocketed more than a division or so without moving units involved in cleaning up the pocket north.

I planned on moving the two least beaten up corps back north, alternating rest and movement for the formations moving north so one division could use the rail capacity as the other units rested either in the north or the south.