Elsenborn Ridge:
Scenario Preview, Chapter Zero
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2025

Elsenborn Ridge is the oldest game in the Panzer Grenadier lineup that’s still in print; we’ve cycled through not only the games that came before, but a few of those that appeared after. It’s stuck around because it’s simply one of the best games we’ve ever made. It has a well-known setting (the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge) despite its kind of lame title. It features Americans battling German attackers, with paratroopers on both sides. And the good guys won.

Elsenborn Ridge has 35 scenarios, in eight chapters plus an introductory section (the introductory scenario is numbered Zero). That numbers right in the sweet spot for Panzer Grenadier: enough so that you know you’ll have plenty of opportunities to play, and can pick just the right type or size of scenario out of that 35, for what you want to play at any given moment.

A little while back, with Elsenborn Rudge due for reprint, I decided that it needed updating to bring it up to the same standards as the most recent Panzer Grenadier games. We’d passed it over, because it was indeed already a very good game. But it had the old-style “shotgun” model of scenarios: they did not relate to one another, except for all of them coming from the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge.

For the new edition, I went through all of the scenarios, cleaning up a few things and making sure they were all in line with the Fourth Edition rules. And now they’re also grouped into an introduction plus eight chapters, in our now-usual story-arc format. The scenarios tell the story of their segment of the battle, and then there’s a “battle game” linking them together so that you can play them as a campaign with a simple set of victory conditions for the full sequence of scenarios.

Elsenborn Ridge opens with an introduction to Panzer Grenadier. One of the scenarios did not fit into the chapter structure, but fortunately, it’s also one that makes for an excellent first experience with the game system (it has no tanks, though it does have some special rules for heavy snow).

Let’s light this candle with a look at Chapter Zero.

Get Off Your Ass
With the Vichy French island of Martinique in the Caribbean holding itself aloof from the Allied cause and, supposedly, re-supplying Axis submarines, the Americans laid plans to invade. A new parachute battalion, the 551st, would spearhead the invasion followed by a glider battalion. Amphibious landings would be made by a provisional Marine brigade and the Army’s 1st Infantry Division.

Troopers of the 551st get off their asses and to the front in the Ardennes.

Individual troopers trained at the Parachute Replacement School at Fort Benning, then secretly transferred to the Panama Canal Zone where the battalion was activated in November 1942. In the Canal Zone they underwent intense jungle warfare training, spurred by the repeated shouts of their commander, Lt. Col. Wood Joerg, to “Get off your ass!” Joerg’s mantra became the battalion’s slogan, usually abbreviated GOYA.

Invasion seemed imminent in May 1943, when the battalion was alerted for action. But by July Martinique’s Vichy French governor had come over to the Allied side, and the paratroopers stood down, returning to Fort Bragg in August. After nearly a year of further training, they deployed to Italy in June 1944 and finally made a combat jump, dropping into southern France in August 1944. The battalion saw action through the late summer and early fall, but that winter it would be thrown into the crucible.

One of many airborne units summoned to help fill the gaps ripped in Allied lines by the German Ardennes offensive, the 551st spearheaded the 82nd Airborne Division’s counter-attack. Casualties mounted, and by the morning of 7 January 1945 Joreg’s initial 643 men were down to about 250 when James Gavin of the 82nd ordered him to capture the village of Rochelinval. The GOYAs had no artillery support and no winter camouflage, and Joerg protested that the attack was suicidal. Gavin insisted, and the troopers went forward over half a mile of open ground. Alerted German mowed them down, but the Americans made it into their positions and took the village at bayonet point. Only 110 were left, and Gavin received permission to disperse the battalion’s survivors as individual replacements across his own division’s depleted units.

Scenario Zero
Get Off Your Ass
7 January 1945
The 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion had been formed in 1942 and trained in jungle warfare in the Panama Canal Zone for a combat drop on the French-ruled island of Martinique in the Caribbean. Sent to Europe when the island shifted to Free French allegiance, they had jumped into southern France in August 1944 and were with Seventh Army when they were summoned to the Ardennes as an emergency reinforcement. Despite massive losses, they pushed forward toward the town of Rochelinval, dominating the last intact bridge over the river Salm.

Conclusion
The Goya Battalion had gotten this far after days of limited sleep and rations and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, including a charge with fixed bayonets. They took Rochelinval in a bloody assault termed a “suicide mission” by their commander when he was denied artillery support. The 551st held, having lost 70 percent of its men - in Company A, only seven men remained standing. A month later the 110 survivors were distributed among units of the 82nd Airborne Division and the unit was stricken from Army rolls. With its commander, Lt. Col. Wood Joerg, killed in action and battalion records destroyed, the battalion simply disappeared until 2001 when it received a Presidential Unit Citation for the stand at Rochelinval.

Notes
Swarms and swarms of low-energy Germans arrive to assault the Forgotten Battalion, with its sky-high morale but no artillery support. The Americans simply have to survive, which is no easy task.

And that is our introduction. Next time, the action heats up with Chapter One.

Order Elsenborn Ridge Here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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