Der Alte Fritz

This site has a huge range of combat documents albeit at Division and Army level divided up into 43 subjects: http://www.teatrskazka.com/Raznoe/SbornikBoevyhDokumentov/Issues.html The original was part of the Experience of War Study by the General Staff

Try this series, http://www.soldat.ru/files/4/6/15/218/ which gives tactical examples down to platoon level The Company level one is easy to access see: http://militera.lib.ru/science/taktika_rota/index.html as your browser can translate the webpages for you automatically. Similarly Pamyat Naroda does have extraordinarily detailed maps, for instance this one of the Sandomir Bridgehead which shows virtually every single German Machine Gun position. https://pamyat-naroda.ru/documents/view/?id=100681962

The "Handbook on Soviet Military Forces" is available here in a very good scanned copy from University of Nebreska http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dodmilintel/30/?utm_source=digitalcommons.unl.edu%2Fdodmilintel%2F30&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

For those of you wanting to do a little research, have a look at Pamyat Naroda using this rather good search engine: http://vnr.github.io/pamyat-naroda-search/ complete with Fond index here: http://www.teatrskazka.com/Raznoe/Fondy_TsAMO/Fonds_PamyatNaroda.html and Front/Army index here: http://www.teatrskazka.com/Raznoe/Fondy_TsAMO/JBD_Armies_BS_SA.html and an index to 3,500,000 records here (see last post): http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=223176 For instance 010/500 Tank Brigade shtat Overview of the tank brigade:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459867010/500 tank brigade HQ:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459868010/501 tank battalion (3 in a brigade):https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459869010/502 Motor submachine-gun battalion:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459870010/503 anti-aircraft machine-gun company:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459871010/504 HQ company:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459872010/505 service company:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459873010/506 medical platoon:https://pamyat-naroda.ru/dou/?docID=130459874

Lets be realistic here. The first CMRT module will be at least 3 YEARS AFTER LAUNCH. That is way slower than CMN or CMFI and with the new CMN+ (CMFB) out and demanding a module as well.... It is obvious that sales of CMRT were not good enough to put it on the 'fast track'. Any additional items that we may see will be launched first in other modules, snow in CMFB, Waffen SS in CMN and so if we get a Vistula-Oder module it will have a couple of new Soviet vehicles and all the other bits from other modules, As for early war, that will never come out so go back to CMBB. Best you can hope for is 1943 and Kursk.

Have a look here for late war Soviet Tactics: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=131 http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=132 http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=409

I think that Slysniper makes a good point. But on the other hand if you examine what the CMBB lobby wants out of CMRT then that could be valuable to the future development of CMRT. We waited 3 years for CMRT and here we are 18+ months further on and no sign of an add odd or pack or anything really. An extending game for later on in 1944/5 similar to Market Garden is not on the stocks either. Yet much of the German equipment and units must already have been made for the Normandy series? Similarly the step up needed for scenario design has produced only a handful of player designed scenarios - 51 in the Repository, with 3 in April, 1 in March 2 in Feb and 1 in Jan for a total in the last 4 months. The Scenario Depot 2 contains 1161 CMBB scenarios CMBB spawned a whole plethora of new website supporting mods and mods packs and scenarios while CMRT relies on the Repository and support from a previous CMBO/BB/AK site by Greenasjade. I do not have the sales figures but I think this would indicate a lack of player engagement with the game. I would argue that more frequent smaller releases of new units would help, a simplified scenario designer and longer timescales for the games, especially for the Eastern Front which lasted 46 months and had a limited range of equipment on the Soviet side compared with Normandy and its 10 month campaign. There is a real chance given Battlefronts wide range of interests Modern, Normandy, Italy, Russia that these individual projects will suffer through too tight and narrow a focus.

a new variation on this to allow some line of sight and firing is to include an area behind the trench and fill it with a wooden bunker (unarmed) which allows some LOS (being further back than the front of the trench and some shooting from cover by the pixeltruppen.

How do we know that this is not just Soviet propaganda? Because the Germans experienced exactly the same problems on their side of the new border between the Vistula and the San. The Otto programme ran for 6 months, from late 1940 until April 1941, used 90,000 railway men and 300,000 tonnes of steel to build 7 lines that could carry 420 pairs of trains daily from the old German border to the new Soviet border across Poland. And they had the modern portion of the Polish railway network! The line up pre-Barbarossa is significant 420 trains a day on the German side and 108 trains a day on the Soviet side. Germans have continuous gauge from the factories to the front, the Soviets do not. Soviet transportation outside the old borders of the USSR does not support the idea of an offensive and you cannot support an offensive by lorry from railheads at the old border either because the realistic limit is only 250 km.

What you have to understand about the Soviet occupation of the Kresy is that it involved 1) Stripping out valuable factories from the towns to send back east 2) Removal of around 320,000 politically unreliable people to the interior of the USSR 3) Removal of the Polish Army POWs to Katyn and other places such as Siberia 4) Establishment of a large garrison to control the areas 5) A large programme of political re-education and use of police, NKVD resources to control groups such as the Ukrananian Nationalists 6) A two year reconstruction of the railways costing 3 times the budget allocated for investment in the railways of the entire Soviet Union over 5 years. The area we are talking about is larger than Belgium and Holland combined, and contains 13,000,000 people. I really do not see this being set up as an offensive base against Germany other than a proposed spoiling attack given the communications problems and the drop by over half between the old Soviet frontier and the new one.

John The problem with this line of argument is simply that it is logistically unsupported. A major offensive launched from the Kresy (Borderlands in Polish) ie the occupied part of Eastern Poland would have to overcome 300km of poor communications before even entering enemy territory PLUS a change in Gauge to Standard from Broad. This is a description of the railway by Kovalev (who headed the NKPS throughout most of the war under Lasar Kaganovich) Traffic routes in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in 1939 were almost destroyed.*The railway network there was a relatively thick: it was created mainly at a time when these areas were part of the Russian Empire (and only a small part of Western Ukraine - the Austro-Hungarian Empire).*According to the cross-border provision of these areas the railway network was designed with the strategic appointment.*However, over the years between the two world wars, according to the general attitudes of the authorities*[24]*bourgeois Poland, see Western Ukraine and Western Belarus as Polish colony, railways these areas derelict.*They have been altered to Western European gauge (1435 mm), with some of the lines was made ​​the second main road, and the rails were used in the construction and reconstruction of roads in Poland itself.*New lines have been built a little bit, and all of them were built in preparation for war with the Soviet Union.*On most of the rail network in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus traffic volume in 1939 was at about 1913 Density of traffic almost everywhere was 1.5-2 million tkm / km or less, and only on the line Lviv - Przemysl exceed 5 million tkm / km.*{61} Quote: The length of railways in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus was 6.7 thousand km (including 4.9 thousand km of single track and 1.8 thousand km of double-track lines).*The roads were narrow gauge, and locomotive and car fleet heterogeneous.*Thus, the locomotive fleet of 120 steam locomotive 5264 series fleet of passenger cars - 129 types of freight car fleet - 60 types.*Rails and rolling stock were characterized not only large multi-type, but worn.*Almost 80% of locomotives, mostly foreign-built, were older than 15 years.*The average age of passenger cars was 28 years, cargo - 23 years.*Due to the large excess of the rolling stock (in stock was more than 25% of locomotives and almost 20% of freight wagons), cheap labor and the absence of mechanical means to repair the park in no hurry, repair base was poorly developed. Quote: the situation in the border area in the transport relations were not in our favor.*Weak capacity of the railway to the west of the old borders of the USSR was the bottleneck of the transport pipeline.*So, in the east on the six railway lines with nine different tracks to the train Rokad Ovruch - Korosten - Shepetovka - Kamenetz-Podolsk could bring 259 trains a day (and the same to send back).*But to the west of this belt, the railway passes only*five railway direction with six tracks, which was passed only 108 pairs of trains.*Within Western Ukraine total capacity existing there six to eight railway lines of gauge is 168 pairs per day.*Railways in the Baltics, as noted, were low-capacity, stations in areas near the border of East Prussia were not ready for the mass unloading troops. When the Germans came to cross this area they initially aimed for 25 trains a day each way for each Army Group ie. 75 trains a day, by around September. So it seems pretty clear from the Soviet accounts that Soviet Poland had just finished converting gauge but had not had much in the way of track improvement or building of new lines, stations, etc before the German invasion of June 1941. Since Soviet Poland has 6,700km of railways of which 1,800 km is double tracked and 4,900 km single tracked the cost of reconstruction of 10,000 million rubles at 1940 prices and a construction time of two years is in line with the Five Year Plan figures of 3,370 million rubles for 1936 investment. This was clearly a huge project that only started in the Spring of 1941.

Hi John Scott prodded from my slumber! Re Icebreaker: I am afraid that I think Suvurov is wrong in his assertion and here is the reason why. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 it took western Poland which was modern, well resourced and had a good transport network. It also took half of Eastern Poland beyond the Vistula which was agricultural, a land of Polish overlords and Belorussian peasants with poor transport infrastructure. The Soviets took the other half about 300 km deep which if anything was even in a worse state (as part of their defences the Poles had stripped 70km of the main double railway tracks down to one track reduced the signalling and weakened the bridges. Only local trains. AND ALL OF THIS WAS STANDARD GAUGE. The Soviet Union then annexed the Baltic States of which only Estonia used broad gauge, the rest used a mix with the main lines in STANDARD GAUGE. The invasion of Poland and the annexation of the Baltics was carried out by relatively small forces in a hurry and there was no effort made to change and upgrade the railway tracks for the operation. According to some Soviet sources the change of gauge was not even discussed until mid 1940 and there is considerable doubt as to how much work actually got carried out before the invasion, probably only main lines had their gauge changed and tracks upgraded. If memory serves me right I think we are talking about 7,000 km of track that needs to be virtually rebuilt. Using an easily available source Scott Dunns "Red Army and the Soviet Economy" he makes the point that the mobilization trains travelled in considerable numbers over the Soviet Unions original western railway companies but that there was a capacity fall for the last 300km (ie over the old Polish territory). This of course is the explanation for the big troop movements in late 1940 and early 1941, the Western military Districts uprooted themselves and moved forward to new positions 300km further west because they were adopting the same positions. The numbers on the railway look large because there are three things happening at the same time: 1) The 1st Echelon is moving into 'old'Poland 2) It has its large daily supply demand met over a crappy railway network 3) All the old frontier defences of the Stalin Line are also being ripped up and re-instated 300km further west. No wonder the railways were blocked. The reason equipment was left on trains was that there were no facilities such as shed or storehouses, fuel bunkers in Poland - they were all 300 km further east or being dismantled to move forwards. The reason the occupation of Poland by the full Soviet frontier defences was delayed was because there was not much infrastruture there in Polish days and the Soviets were slow to start building it. When war clouds started to gather it was all done in a rush and a muddle. Like the fuel trains. In the Western military districts they had deep concrete underground bunkers for storing fuel but in Poland there was nothing so it had to be kept on trains to be moved forward when needed. The station mentioned with 1,300 fuel trains is near Kursk, so it is hardly close to the frontier. Its main claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of Nikita Krushchev.

The best solution that I have found is to make the ditch 1 unit deep and line it with a trench fortification. Not perfect as you lose line of sight but makes trenches a bit more survivable against artillery, overwhelming return fire, etc.

I notice that the drivers foot still comes through the floor of the GAZ MM

I think we have fundamentally different definitions of what constitutes a "war of machines". As JasonC said so i just do not see the German war on the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 as a "war of machines". 300 Divisions most of which are horse drawn and of which 15-20 could really be called motorised (remember Panzer Divisions had been cut in half to double their numbers just before the invasion). That is 5% of the force. For every encirclement, Infantry Divisions were needed to do the fighting, the Panzer Divisions made the breakthrough and caused the confusion but were too weak to destroy the enemy. Not really a war of machines, more like the Great War.