Hill 192 map

[Christian Knudsen]

Hi all!

 

I have uploaded my WIP map of Hill 192, west of St Lo., which was assaulted and captured by the 2nd ID on 11 Jul 44, to the repository - available here:

 

http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=3505

 

This map covers most of the AOR of 2/38 IR, but omits much of the contested area to the north of the hamlet of Cloville.

 

I am currently working on an expanded map that extends the map from the current 1120x 1152 hexes to 1520x 2496 hexes, in order to accommodate the entire 38 Infantry Regiment AOR, including the infamous Kraut corner and extending down past Le Soulaire to the hamlet of La Calvaire on the St. Lo - Bayeux highway, which was the end-day objective for 2 Bn, 38 IR. 

 

This is all to support my (now paused for map and scenario making) solo campaign based around Broadsword56's CMBN adaptation of Joe Balkoski's boardgame St. Lo, as outlined in a series of excellent posts which can be easily found in this forum.

 

Unlike Broadsword56, I have not skewed this map to match the board hex orientation, as my Google Earth-fu skills are too weak, but it is still fairly easy to match the board hexes to the ground (although I feel that the location of Cloville on the game board is actually that of the Hotel Siard some 300-350m east of the hamlet.  But I digest...)

 

I am close to finishing the expanded map, and once released, I may start to build historical scenarios based on the master map, ranging from the Coy assault on Kraut corner, to the 2 Bn regimental assault on the entire III Bn, 9 FJ Regt.  But one step at a time...

 

Let me know what you think - this is my first foray into map building, and I am definitely learning as I go!

Edited March 4, 2015 by Christian Knudsen

[rtdood]

Well I don't believe it!

 

I've been working on the same thing! Fancy that - certainly brought a smile to my face when I saw your post Christian   . Great minds think alike. It's also my first forte into building my first map/scenario.  

 

My advice would be careful on working on a larger size of the map. My map is Huge, spanning from La Marerie through to the end of St-Georges-D'Ille, and being as realistic as I wanted to be I added trees and elevation points as I went. Unfortunately doing so added massively towards the loading time of the map, especially when you factor into units and their movements in game. I think it may have been a better idea for me to tackle each section of the engagement at Hill 192 as a individual scenario (such as kraut corner) or/and the advancement to Cloville.

 

You had a really good find with the 2nd Division Hill 192 engineer study map. I've been working on an old OS map of the area which unfortunately is rather small (from the book Battlezone Normandy - Battle for ST-LO). Still, its useful because unlike most maps I've scouted, it has the contours every 5 meters (including the point 192 is directly located at) as opposed to 10 which is what most contour maps I found. 

 

I've finished the map design, added the units (I'm considering an all-for-one scenario for the whole 38th regiment) but for reasons explained it is rather taxing for the game doing this. Will see, I plan to have it out for testing over at a few good men forum early next week (should anyone be interested in doing so that is!). Most likely there will be a lot of editing/scripting needed to be done! 

 

I look forward to seeing how yours comes along :

Edited March 6, 2015 by rtdood

[Broadsword56]

In my experience, it's better to make a master map and then only "detail" the areas that you ultimately cut out to use for specific scenario battles. The master map gives you the basic land tile patterns, hedgerow lines, road net, watercourses, and perhaps some paved splotches to mark where the areas of houses or buildings will be. No trees or veg!! Then place all the elevation points. Just having this type of master map will save you a lot of mapping time. And you won't waste time sweating details for areas that may never be played upon.

A master map isn't just a huge honkin CM map -- it's a different type of map altogether -- and is not meant to be used in-game. Of course you could try to detail and play on one -- some have -- but it tends not to be a very satisfying experience. CM isn't really best suited to division and brigade-sized formations, and the lag and load issues make it an exercise in futility.

Edited March 7, 2015 by Broadsword56

[Christian Knudsen]

Through selective laziness and the lack of the 23 IR in the St Lo game, I am only including the area of 38 IR.  This "limits" the map to only 3 3/4 square km.  Yours must be close to twice that!

 

For elevation I used the google maps "contour line cheat", as I call it.  This gave me 10m contours, which is plenty fine for me, and matched very closely the engineer study.  The engineer study is good, but matches the 1947 photos less the further south one goes.  In fact, you can pretty much chart the front line by where the bocage gaps stop being indicated.  I keep expecting to see "HERE BE DRAGONS" south of Le Soulaire.  Perils of working from aerial recce photos taken at times under much less than ideal situations, I guess.

 

I should be done the expanded map this weekend, and will post it to the repository when it is done.  Then I will work on scenarios.  I hear what you are saying regarding CMBNs being less suitable at and above Bn level, Broadsword, but there is a big part of me that wants to do a regimental action, if only to get a better sense of the flow of the actual battle in terms of time and space.  We know that II/38, with only 2 rifle companies available, was held up first at Kraut corner and then at Cloville, but that progress was steady thereafter.  I/38, deprived of tank support for most of the day, was slow but steady, but had to commit its 3rd rifle company up the middle after its 2 assault companies started to stall and separate a bit. 

 

And what of the Germans?  We know that the hill was held by III/9 FJ, but my map is based on American, not German boundaries, which extended from approximately the D59 road running N/S between St Andre de l'Epine and Cloville, all the way to roughly Purple Heart Draw.  American intel estimated average German Bn strength at about 500 men.  Since the OOB bayonet strength of a June 44 FJ Bn is 489 men, we can assume that the Germans were basically at full strength, although an argument can be made that this should be adjusted to somewhere betwwn 70-90% to allow for REMFs, etc.  But in my case, the area east of the hill is not depicted, so we can safely subtract a company (with a portion of supporting arms) from the Bn OOB.  As well, the depth coy should probably lose a pl or more to reflect it being committed to the St Georges d'Elle area, not the hill itself.  So our FJ Bn becomes a FJ company, with 2 additional Platoons in depth.  We are also told that the 12 FJ Stug Bde, the 3rd FJ Aufklarungscompanie, and the 3rd FJ Pioniere Bn were committed to the 2 ID area over the course of the day.  We know the armour was committed early, as there are reports of armour duels at Cloville.  But FJ Stugs were also present in the 29th Div area, although no mention of German armour is present in accounts of the fighting around Purple Heart Draw and St Georges d'Elle.  Various sources tell us that the Bde was down to a strength of 11 runners on 27 Jun, and that a month later it had 10, but that the unit had been "badly mauled" on 11 Jul.  From this we can guesstimate that the Bde certainly had no more than 15 or so Stugs on the 11th.  With the knowledge that Bde was split over several areas, I feel comfortable allocating the Germans no more than 2 platoons or 6 Assault guns for the Hill 192 fight, and probably more realistically 1 platoon/3 guns.  We can similarly pare down the Recce coy and the Pioneer Bn.  The American advance went furthest in the valley between St Andre de l'Epine and Hill 192, reaching the St. Lo-Bayeux highway at La Calvaire and to the west in the 29 ID area.  We can therefore expect that 3 FJ div would have used its last reserves in these areas; 5 and 8 FJ Regt, and I/9 FJ were not so much in crisis as II and III/9 FJ.  But again we need to do some guesstimating as to what portions of these units would have been committed to the hill directly.  Based on the fact that 29 ID was driving hard and threatening to turn the flank of the St Lo defence, I would say that no more than 1/3 of these units were committed to the battle for the hill, so a Pl of FJ Aufklarungstruppen, and a Coy of FJ Pioniere, but these last only very late in the battle.

 

Three other issues are notable.

 

The first is artillery.  This was the only use of a rolling barrage by the 2nd ID in the war, and American ammo expenditure was prolific.  The effect was not so much to annihilate as to pin the Germans quite badly, but how to model this without resorting to use of an actual huge rolling barrage over the entire time and space of the scenario?  On the German side, all accounts mention heavy use of German mortars and artillery firing at preregistered targets throughout the depth of the German defence system.  In fact, it seems that German artillery at times contributed as much or more to American holdups than did the Fallschrimjagers themselves.  But how to space reinforcement batteries for both sides is an issue that will have to be tested.

 

The second is German fortifications.  I would argue that CM is fairly bad at depicting the sort of dug in bocage defences that the Germans used - fire positions, communication tunnels and essentially bunkers and dugouts dug right in to the bocage itself.  So how to make the German positions more formidable?  We can safely allocate TRPs and mines in quantity, (and wire - why not?) as both are mentioned, but this does not do it justice, so far as I can tell.

 

The third is battlefield damage.  I have not applied any to the map thus far, but it is agreed that at a minimum Cloville was heavily damaged by artillery both before and during the 11th, and that by the end of the battle the forest near the hill's summit was basically totally destroyed, as reflected by the lack of trees there in the 1947 photos.  In fact it wasn't until doing some digging after looking at the 1947 photos that I realized that this was a wooded area at all.  So I need to apply some damage, which will unfortunately up the load times.  Maybe I will have to let users damage the maps themselves, or just do it for the smaller scenarios...

[mjkerner]

Very impressive, Christian! I like it when a student of a battle goes in-depth researching and building maps, battles and campaigns. If you ever need playtesters whe you get to scenario building, please give me a shout.

[Christian Knudsen]

Ok, expanded map is submitted to the repository and has also been posted at GaJ's CMMODs site. 

 

Now to start working on the Kraut Corner scenario...

[Broadsword56]

Bravo, Christian!

A few thoughts re: Your questions and issues that you summarized above...

 

Artillery -- You can simulate a rolling barrage in CMBN. And I think it would be a mistake to scrimp on artillery supporting the US attack, if it was there historically. Firepower from artillery (and, where available, air and naval) was the only answer the Allies had to the superiority the Germans had in MGs, defensive terrain, and small-unit tactical leadership. In out Saint-Lo campaign, I often used massive rolling barrages with US attacks and still the GIs tended to get slaughtered. So don't be afraid to give the Yanks all their historical artillery support -- they'll need every bit of it.

 

The difficulty for the US was that while they had artillery and ammo in abundance, the terrain offered very few opportunities for FOs to spot and place accurate rounds on target. That's the reason why this hill battle existed in the first place. Hill 192 was giving the Germans a perch from which they could put devastatingly accurate rounds on anything that moved, for miles around. The only other OPs in the heavy bocage country tended to be church steeples (which is why Balkoski marked each one on the map and made them so important in the boardgame). But if you didn't have your OP at Hill 192, Hill 122, or a steeple, you'd be lucky to see a few hundred meters.

 

Re: Bocage defense. True, you can't dig real German bocage defenses in CMBN. But you can do much more than we had available when I made my master map years ago. Ditchlock is a huge asset now. You can sink 1m ditchlocked cuts into the terrain, and then place trenches in them. You can made basement levels to houses. Use foxholes everywhere, lots of sandbags, mines, wire, bunkers, and TRPs for almost every possible indirect fire location. The other important aspect is interlocking fields of fire and mutually supporting positions, placed in depth. If you do all this, you'll have the effect of a bocage defense system even if it doesn't look exactly like the real thing.

 

Re: Damage -- again, no need for that on a master map unless you plan to actually play on it. Better to leave blasted trees, mud, and cratering to the smaller cutout scenarios when you're detailing those maps. But do it yourself because it really adds to immersion. Don't worry about load times if you've got the game map cut down to for a battle size.

 

The load only becomes a big issue if you're trying to play on a master-sized map with regiments and divisions. If you do have to make huge maps and scenarios, you will find a hardy few eager to try them. But I've made them and played them, and I have to say they're not as much fun as one might think. I found the main enjoyment to be the sheer spectacle of seeing all those troops in action. But that soon wore off, as the burden of micromanagement became overwhelming. And larger is not necessarily more realistic, since CM was never designed to model command and control, supply, and other factors at those levels, either. 

[Christian Knudsen]

I agree, basically, on the larger battles issue.  Even on battalion sized battles, I occasionally forget whole platoons while focusing on those elements that are in the thick of it.  But then again, I am a terrible player...

 

Basements, eh?  I assume you would Ditchlock a 1 or 2m depression around the building, and then put a 3 story building into it in order to simulate a 2 story with basement?  I found a thread detailing how to place foxholes over top of hedges which I am ambivalent about using, as I can see it causing some issues around a) forcing the defender in a scenario to use the foxholes I put out, unless I put them absolutely EVERYWHERE), and creating an easy to spot fortification on the "enemy" side of the hedge that automatically becomes a target.

 

Bugger, I just found LLF's building types post.  Now I have to go and take out all my windows...

 

I agree on the american artillery, although I worry that prep barrages will be TOO effective.  It is really surprising how thinly spread out the Germans were here.  They have for this map a 1500m frontage that they have to cover with essentially 3 platoons in the front line, and another 1 or two in reserve.  We know that about a platoon was at Kraut corner, and I would assume that another was at Cloville, although it is possible that this was from the depth company.  This leaves a big frontage for a platoon or two to cover.  I know that the defense was non-linear and based around mutually supporting strongpoints (I assume at section level), but that still is pretty thin.  I want the prep fires to pin the Germans, the question becomes then how much on-call arty to allocate to the Americans.

[Broadsword56]

Well, as long as the Germans are in foxholes and/or bunkers and on HIDE, only a direct or lucky close hit will really hurt them. The Germans should have the ability to deploy a hedgerow or two back from their actual fortified positions -- this was a favorite tactic, letting them wait out the bombardment and return to their positions as soon as the barrage lifted past them.

 

Also, the rolling barrage was a rolling carpet of preplanned area fire, not observed.fire on known targets. The way to simulate that in CMBN is to set two columns of Allied TRPs in the direction of the barrage, then set preplanned barrages on a successive lines between the TRPs. They're set pregame, with increasing delays. You put the FO with the ability to issue the fire call way in the rear, in a command post, with no LOS to the enemy side, allow the call to be made only "blind" by radio. (There are old threads with much more detail about how to set these up.)

[Christian Knudsen]

Ok, the regimental battle is RIGHT OUT.  I spent some time today trying to figure out what artillery units were allocated to the 38th Infantry, and came up with a minimum of 3 Bns of 105, 2 of which were M7 Priest Bns, (48 tubes) two Bns of Corps heavies (although I was not able to figure out which ones) (24 tubes), a company of 107mm mortars (6 tubes), plus the regimental cannon company (6 tubes) and the regiment's integral mortars (18 tubes).  This is a total of 102 tubes, and I figure that there may have been another 2 - 4 Corps level heavy Bns allocated - there were 8 such Bns in V Corps at the time, and since the 38th was the Corps schwerpunkt on the 11th, I can see more having been used. 

 

This is all way too much to handle, especially I can't see a way to allocate FOs to regimental level HQs, as no such beast exists.  The heavies seem to have been used mostly for depth targets, but even so allowing the US player access to 6-18 heavy batteries, plus the smaller stuff, seems a bit much, both in terms of effect and in terms of organization.  Especially when you consider that American ammo stockpiles were such as to allow an allocated battery to fire about twice what the game considers "full" ammo.  So each offboard battery would have to be purchased twice, once for the prep fire, and once as a reinforcement.  I am a bit of an obsessive perfectionist, but even I know how to pick my battles.

 

So I am working on the Kraut corner scenario, an American company attacks a FJ platoon with some support weapons and artillery.  Experimenting with making bocage defensive positions work, and wondering how to stop a human player from being able to bypass the Germans entirely, without resorting as a designer to putting a great big artillery target - er, victory location, on the place where Kraut corner was actually located.  Great fun!

[Broadsword56]

Good decision!

Your findings underscore the value of a boardgame like Saint-Lo to manage all that stuff -- things that matter, but are properly outside the scope of battalion-plus operations. Trying to shoehorn all that stuff into CMBN in-game would suck the fun factor out of the play experience pretty darned fast, IMHO.

 

I think Balkoski's design did a really good job in accurately representing the historically available artillery support, yet making it easy to use without micromanagement. In my op-tac campaign, I used the boardgame for all the interdiction and counterbattery artillery missions, and to do the prep fires in support of battalion-level battles (applying any suppressions or losses to the setup situation in CMBN). Then, the assigned direct support artillery would be included as on-call offmap artillery in the CMBN scenario.

[Christian Knudsen]

Work continues, I have just to finish the briefings and then I can start my own testing.

 

Struggling with building a rolling barrage that does not tax the player too much, and is not too open to blatant player cheating.  I wish there were a way to limit access to certain batteries to specific FOs.  I currently have a "barrage" FO that is locked in the back, and if I could assign batteries to him in such a way that only he had access, that would remove a lot of potential for the player to call in fires meant for the barrage.

[derek burke]

Well it's thanks to your hard work and research I have for the first time in over 70 years I now know how a relative of ours Pte Abraham Kalmikoff 38th 2nd Div met his death on the 11th July '44. Unfortunately his parents or the wife he left behind  didn't live long enough to know. But his daughter who he never met, I'm sure will be interested. For his heroism, "Abe" received the Silver Star  and the Purple Heart.

Best Regards Derek  Burke...….rdburke53@gmail.com