LemuelG

Good point, but I have no idea which other units recieved Lorraine/Hotchkiss conversions - something like a hundred of them went to Panzer formations other than the 21st - I just referenced them because I figured they were a bit more famous. A Lorraine chassis-conversion. Sd.Kfz 135, 7.5cm Pak40/1 auf Lorraine Schlepper (f)! The gun and mount are identical to a Marder's, unsurprisingly.

Curiosity got a hold of me, I had to do some tests to see whether I was mad or not. I did a few rounds, time demands have got the better of me for now though. I figure it's best to test with as few variables as possible, conditions of fire-superiority for the attacker (about 2:1), who also gets a hedgerow. The field: Default size map; 'mixed-grass' style terrain; perfectly flat. Two parralel rows of 'tall' bocage, approx. 200m apart, running from north to south. The forces: US para company + battalion HQ - 131 men. German platoon, company HQ and HMG section - 63 men. Rough 2:1 advantage for the US, plus 3 light mortars. Ten minutes time-limit for show-down - time for forces to spot and engage from 30-60 seconds. Soldiers spread evenly along the lines of bocage facing each other. First round of tests is the base-line, no foxholes, US has 3 60mm mortars slightly behind the line, it's HQs can call them freely. When I give numbers they will be for (total casualties/total squads routed and broken) Test # - Test type (US losses) (German losses) 1 - mortar/no-holes (7/0) (30/4) 2 - mortar/no-holes (9/0) (33/5) 3 - mortar/no-holes (7/0) (31/4) 4 - mortar/no-holes (3/0) (33/4) 5 - mortar/no-holes (4/0) (39/3) Clear trend - Germans take about 50% casualties, half the rest are rendered ineffective, fleeing and/or out-of-command. Negligible harm to the US troops. Now we add holes, 13 of them to be exact - almost one for every team, two are overloaded. 6 - mortar/holes (9/0) (7/0) 7 - mortar/holes (15/0) (11/1) 8 - mortar/holes (8/0) (16/1) 9 - mortar/holes (16/0) (14/0) 10 - mortar/holes (18/0) (8/0) Dramatic turn-around, Germans now holding their own, and sometimes even coming out ahead, despite mortar-fire; near-misses by mortars are notably less effective on the fortified Germans. Casualties reduced by 50%+, and even though they are still heavily out-gunned the Germans hold stronger, with only 1 team routing, at most. A few more, this time without mortars on the US side. First without holes for baseline. 11 - no-mortar/no-holes (8/0) (27/3) 12 - no-mortar/no-holes (9/0) (21/2) 13 - no-mortar/no-holes (8/0) (22/3) Now giving the Germans back their spider-holes. 14 - no-mortar/holes (12/0) (9/0) 15 - no-mortar/holes (12/0) (12/0) 16 - no-mortar/holes (14/0) (9/0) Again the holes are a significant boost for the Germans; in their bocage-holes, and with no nassty mortarsss, they are rock-solid morale-wise. It would have been nice to run it longer to see if the Germans could possibly win, but I haven't the time now. Short, inflammatory conclusion: holing your bocage will at least double effectiveness of defensive fighting-positions. It works, real good.

Beats me, I posted this after reading about how this specifically couldn't be done in another thread; it was gonna be a surprise for the scenario - but I thought, why not? So much moaning about the poor quality of prepared positions, but there are answers for the designer who is prepared to get sufficiently 'cute' with the engine. After I stumbled on this and instituted changes to defensive positions, the Germans went from usually bugging-out after a couple of minutes of a fire-fight (as good as dying for the AI) to holding on long enough to completely run out of ammo in some cases, if the allied player runs out of mortar rounds he's in deep poop. I'm now tinkering very carefully with their experience/motivation levels. Try it out for yourselves. I'm interested to see and hear of your results.

This is only do-able by scenario designers; I discovered it after accidentally laying a row of bocage through some foxholes already placed on the map. It's that simple. Now I just find the section of hedge I want 'fortified', delete it in the editor, go to placement-mode and move some foxholes into the gap, back to the map-editor and replace the hedge - voila! After doing this to some key positions dislodging the Germans became much more difficult, no genuine testing has been made - observations appear very favorable, and I'm running with it. They are still the same-old earth-pimples we all know and love though, scenario featuring bocage-forts soon

Gun displaced after some aimed mortaring, gunner notably shell-shocked.

Looking at the issue as 'left/right' only confuses matters. While Gregor Strasser was alive and in a position of influence, the Nazi platform had more than a faint whiff of socialism about it, there is no doubt the party platform could be described as 'leftist'. Strasser was highly influential, and the organizational genius behind the rise of the Nazis from Bavarian curiosity into national powerhouse; Schleicher offered him the vice-chancellorship ahead of Hitler, and it sealed his fate (being murdered SS men.. I mean 'pussys' through the window of his cell). A monolithic, 'extremist' view of Nazis in general is a mistaken attitude, a vote for the NSDAP was not exactly a vote for a bayonet in the heart of every Gypsy-child. There's way more to it.

Hard to be sure, my guess is that it's one of the Lorraine/Hotchkiss chassis-conversion SP guns of the type that served with 21st Panzer's artillery regiment. In one of my Concord books (D-Day Tank Warfare)there's a photo of one with a WWI-vintage 150mm howitzer installed, the caption states it's unit as "Verstarken Schnellen Brigade West". Attached to 21st panzer. Other photos of the dumps for tanks captured in the Cotentin show a real mish-mash of stuff, most of it French-manufactured and converted. It just wont be Normandy until we have, at the very least, Somua R35 tanks... they should have made it in before Panthers But I digress, that's for another thread

Oh Lawd; personally, I will only begin gushing once captured Renault and Hotchkiss tanks are added It's Normandy baby! Keepin' it real etc.

Maybe you live in some mythical land with perfect motorway traffic, but I assure you, in my neck of the woods it's a biatch. And oddly enough the behaviour you describe is almost exactly what happens. A long column driving at speed and far too close to each other, even a small tap on the brakes from the head of the column can be amplified into a half-hour long stop-start crawl a couple of kilometers down the line. don't ya love it? All that time in a traffic jam you were imagining the apocalyptic events which caused the delay, but it's never anything interesting, just another tail-gating ass-hat f*ing with your life. It is, quite simply the greatest challenge to civic planners trying to relive motorway traffic congestion. Bad driving, brake-humping, lane-jumping MORONS. I gotta move to the country.

What bugs me is that you have moralized the situation to the point where it has completely flipped on it's head. Suddenly, in IMHO-land, the Imperial Japanese are victims, and the US becomes the genocidal aggressor. Give me a break, the amount of Japanese civilians killed pales in comparison to the 17 million killed at the hands of Imperial Japan, genocidal beasts that they were. The US applied precisely as much violence as was necessary to achieve the goals of it and it's allies - if there was any similarity between IJ and the US, then the Japanese surrender would have just been the beginning of the massacre. If the dim-wits who ran the Japanese war-of-conquest had admitted their shame, and that they had lost the war sometime in '43 - then committed ritual-suicide or surrendered themselves to justice, a lot of Japanese, and other Asian, civilians would have lived.

Then I suggest you look again. Let me summarize that article for you:

His conclusions and theories should be examined and challenged like any other; the work he and his team put in making interviews and gathering information has been of inestimable value to many historians, and has enriched the historiography immensely. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater

Terrific news! Tactical-victory for team 3-squad; I must admit I wasn't confident. If it is to be a new/alternative ToE can it also reflect some other changes as-outlined in Four Stars..? Such as: 4-man platoon HQs (1st lt., 2nd lt., buck sergeant; radioman); seperate zook-teams in every platoon etc. Thank-you very much for your time Steve, and mercy 'Team we need captured French tanks in first module!' now recruiting

Agreed, hopefully it is being worked on at the same time as AI triggers.

It would be nice not to have to wait for two modules (so... at least a year from now) to be able to make (what I believe after careful research to be) an accurate D-Day scenario. I don't think my proposal is too far-out in coding terms, I was careful to ask for something that would work in the way that the game currently does. To re-iterate: I would like full 12-man squads to be able to be added as 'specialist teams', and for there to be a toggle when a squad is selected to add a BAR to the squad in place of a rifle. I've kind of run out of steam on this, the passage in Nordyke's (voted by the 82nd VA as it's official historian, a respectable source) detailing the platoon-structure, specifically stating it as being instituted pre-Normandy is the best evidence I can find, and it appears to be conclusive. Maybe it is just the 505th, or formations intended for the most important objectives, it should still be included. I was hoping there would be a convenient, 21st century method of contacting the author and seeking clarification, but he hasn't made it easy for me. From here, in the southern Pacific conversing via letter is prohibitively slow and un-reliable. I found a potential contact address for him in Texas, if any Americans/other forumites would like to try to correspond with the author to try to get to the bottom of this, I will provide it by PM. I'm sure there is good reason for him to write what he has written, and that he will help clear things up for us.

Yeah, the opportunity was there while Poland was still in play. But with war against Stalinist Russia still on the cards I'm not sure prudence was as foolish as it looks after the fact. The red fear plays into a lot of decision-making at this stage of events; end-result is that Poland gets thrown to the wolves.

Yeah, every minute the Japanese held-on was yet more enslavement, death, torture, disease, and famine for the millions of innocents still subject to their, frankly, sick and detestable cultural crusade. Talk about Nemesis, and in the same breath you deliver the best possible deterrent to Stalin's mischief. When your enemies lose it is a good thing, do I endorse the killing of civilians? No, and that is why the enemy needed to be mercilessly destroyed. It's a shame so much violence was necessary to achieve our goals, but when you face a life-or-death conflict it is pure folly not to respond with every possible tool at your disposal. Too bad for them that happened to be the greatest destructive power ever unleashed by man, someone picked the wrong fight. Submarine-blockades will not do when your kinsmen and allies need succour immediately. F* Imperial Japan.

You cannot attach them to a squad sergeant. That is not a satisfactory solution.

Murphy, Robert M. (2009-04-07). No Better Place to Die (Kindle Locations 952-959). Casemate Publishing. Kindle Edition. (yeah.. that was the 7th, close enough) (the 8th, makes specific mention of "the squad's BAR") Nordyke, Phil (2006-11-15). Four Stars of Valor: The Combat History of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II (Kindle Locations 4754-4756). Zenith Press. Kindle Edition. There are two points I hope to make (by this lazy Kindle-search for 'BAR' then cutting-pasting examples to forum) here, the first is that it is kinda hard to avoid BARs when making a historical D-Day scenario involving the 505th - it doesn't matter to me how they got them (I know it does to BFC, I get this), I need to be able to include them. Somehow, someway. I am a sick, sick person The second is that Sergeant Sampson ought to be the model for all your 60mm mortar-men

152 adds-up if you take the organization described by Lt 'Joe' Meyers (quoted earlier) at face-value: 8-man company HQ (x 1); 4-man platoon HQs (x 3); 3 x 12-man rifle squads per platoon; 1 x 6-man mortar section and 1 x 2-man bazooka team per platoon (making 48 men total per platoon, an 8-man co.HQ makes 152).

I went mining for nuggets in Google Books, one I dug-up is a passage from All American, All the Way, by Phil Nordyke, which is very similair to the passage from Four Stars... except he is much more explicit: (p.3) I think it's fair to say he meant 'platoons' instead of 'companies' in the first sentence (poor editing, nothing more), and the final count appears to be out by 2 (?), but nevertheless leaves little to conjecture. Incidentally this figure meshes more-or-less perfectly with the strength of A/505 at dawn on D-Day given by Bob Murphy. There's also this from everybody's fave, Stephen Ambrose: All I really took away from that was that the author's sums don't add up. He does say there are three squads though, so he's on the team

I think the reasons for not going and not making wholesale changes to the ToE are good, as you've outlined. But for example: I can find evidence that puts BARs in at least two different squads of A/505 on the morning of the 6th; where would they have picked these up? My guess is out of the bundles that dropped with them, where they got all their equipment. That's why my suggested compromise was to allow single extra squads to be purchased in the design phase and added to each platoon, and that the presence of a BAR in a squad be determined by a toggle in design-mode, BAR/No-BAR? A bit like Grenadier/not-grenadier for the Germans. This way if a scenario-designer, through thorough research, is satisfied that these changes are appropriate then he can include them in his OOB.

I concede this, though Nordyke does feel at liberty to embellish the testimony: "Lieutenant Meyers was briefed on the unofficial table of organization and equipment that had been adopted before Normandy, with the addition of a squad to each platoon in a parachute infantry company." The 'before Normandy' part was in the author's words. Otherwise it is Meyers simply describing the state of a para platoon in D/505 as he found it. Nordyke comes highly recommended, I found the book after reading Bob Murphy's endorsement in No Better Place To Die. 17 troops per-plane is conservatively-estimated as well - the first testimonial by a para on that site gives the troops in his plane (elements of H/505) as 21. Total planes for the 505th + divisional HQ elements + attached engineers is 120 (according to the site linked), at 21 troopers per plane that gives us a (rough potential) capacity of 2520 men, subtract the head-count of three on-paper rifle battalions and you're left with almost 1000 'spare' places for some engineers and HQ elements. The extra bodies required to make up an extra squad in each platoon is only 324 men. To my mind this is actually a very good reason for. Go team 3-squads!

A more complete quoting of the key passage, for discussion's sake (courtesy my horrid Kindle): Nordyke, Phil (2006-11-15). Four Stars of Valor: The Combat History of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II (Kindle Locations 5287-5308). Zenith Press. Kindle Edition.

I would like this too. Good idea.