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German SMG formations?


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German infantry armed with lots of SMGs (usually MP38/40) is a US TV and movie trope and fairly common in Russian and other eastern countries' war movies and TV programs. Knowing German low level TO&E, this isn't really credible and is all about looking cool and being exciting to watch, but I've now discovered that the Germans DID operate such formations at both Stalingrad and Kursk. In Soviet account after account in Jason Mark's Island of Fire and in Valeriy Zamulin's Destroying The Myth, there are many descriptions of attacks by SMG gunners. In Zamulin's book, I just got through reading of no fewer than 50 SMG gunners supporting a substantial Panzer attack. In the latter case, I believe, based on reported attachments to the Panzers proper, that these are Panzer Grenadiers. In the former case, and working from memory, I believe they were Pioneers. Regardless, this has given me pause, for am unaware of any German infantry formation corresponding to the Soviet SMG company. Can anyone shed some light on this matter, please? Not only does this puzzle me, but I think it could have impact on what's available for both scenario building and QBs when it comes to German troop options.

Regards,

John Kettler

 

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Vergeltungswaffe,

Please tell me more. My CMBB Strategy Guide is packed up in one of my boxes, so I have nothing to which I can readily refer ref Begleitgrenadiers. Where do they fit into the TO&E and which units have them?

Attilaforfun,

A tremendous read, but my head's in information overload. So many fascinating engagements reported, and this is the only account I've ever seen of FlaK 10.5 guns in ATG role. Suggest creating a separate OP for this article and putting it on CMFB Forum. Too juicy for it to be lost here!

Regards,

John Kettler

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If you look at a Rifle Company it would have somewhere in the realm of ~28 MP40s. About 21 of those would be in the Rifle Platoons. If you wanted to create "Assault Platoon" it would be feasible to concentrate them in a single Platoon.

1 SL (MP40)
1 FTL (Mp40)
1 MG (MG obviously)
1 AMG (K98)
5 men (MP40)

Multiply that by three and you would have the 21 MP40s required. Six natural MP40s within the platoon, seven requisitioned from the Company HQ and Weapons Platoon along with an additional eight from either of the other two platoons. This would still leave each sister platoon with 3 and 4 MP40s respectively. Although I'm not entirely sure that you would want to replace every K98 with an MP40 even if you could. Whether the Germans ever did this I  don't know but I have read accounts by U.S. infantrymen of squads being overloaded with additional BARs or Thompsons and one Canadian report of a Company deliberately organizing an SMG heavy platoon before combat.

I have noticed that in the Soviet accounts I've read they tend to mention SMG gunners far more often than just about anyone else. I wonder if that isn't a translation quirk?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/30/2020 at 6:18 PM, com-intern said:

I have noticed that in the Soviet accounts I've read they tend to mention SMG gunners far more often than just about anyone else. I wonder if that isn't a translation quirk?

Originally they were called "avtomatchiki", autogunners. Those who use automatic fire. If you read soviet documents about enemy strength estimations, you don't see huge SMG numbers. Just slang.

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During the fighting in the southern suburbs of Caen on July 18, the 272 German infantry division, which went up from the south of France, was to use this type of unit. . It is more precisely the staff of Gren rgt 980 commanded by the Burian oberst which will form a section in addition to the staff company. This "special" section with 40 STG 42 and 43 commanded by Lieutenant Stefan becomes a shock unit. She will particularly stand out in the Vaucelle neighborhoods facing the Canadians. In urban combat this type of unit turns out to be formidable, but the difficulty of supplying 7.92 Kurz limits its range.

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Perhaps one feature that could be allowed in future CM releases, to cater for the desire for ever-more-specific small units, would be to have weapons vehicles/trucks, the same way the game has ammo trucks and vehicles containing mortars, AT weapons and so on.

Then, during the setup phase, you might even allow squads and teams to 'disarm', and then pickup weapons as the player wants.

It would be time-consuming for the obsessives who wanted very specifically armed units (as it should be), but it would satisfy a need without required BF to program all kinds of obscure, case-specific units.

This feature could even be able to be enabled/disabled in scenario and QB setup screens...

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11 hours ago, Falaise said:

During the fighting in the southern suburbs of Caen on July 18, the 272 German infantry division, which went up from the south of France, was to use this type of unit. . It is more precisely the staff of Gren rgt 980 commanded by the Burian oberst which will form a section in addition to the staff company. This "special" section with 40 STG 42 and 43 commanded by Lieutenant Stefan becomes a shock unit. She will particularly stand out in the Vaucelle neighborhoods facing the Canadians. In urban combat this type of unit turns out to be formidable, but the difficulty of supplying 7.92 Kurz limits its range.

That sounds like a "normal" Sturmzug that was supposed to be formed after the introduction of the MP43. Since it mentions the number 40, maybe it was one based on the older type of infantry division that still had 4 groups in each platoon, not three like the later ones.

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I don't know how the companies of the 272 division were composed
however it seems that only the 980 Gren Rgt was equipped with such a unit on the initiative of the Oberst Burian
Lieutenant Stéphan even specifies in his memory that the unit should not appear on paper
On the division this one was endowed with approximately 400 MP 42-43
Edited by Falaise
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German SMG "companies" were mentioned also in Soviet accounts of Stalingrad. I bet they were ad hoc units and not within formal TOE. One apparently managed to infiltrate neat Tsuikov HQ vie sewers but was fought off.

Edited by Sardaukar
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19 hours ago, Sardaukar said:

German SMG "companies" were mentioned also in Soviet accounts of Stalingrad. I bet they were ad hoc units and not within formal TOE. One apparently managed to infiltrate neat Tsuikov HQ vie sewers but was fought off.

No, this is just a slang. Any German infantrymen were called "avtomatchiki", because Germans relied on heavy automatic fire (from their MG-34).

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On 5/10/2020 at 3:51 AM, DMS said:

No, this is just a slang. Any German infantrymen were called "avtomatchiki", because Germans relied on heavy automatic fire (from their MG-34).

This reminds me of the US Army slang where they would refer to "burp guns" among the Germans, but I was always very confused about what weapon is actually meant by that. One of my old WW2 books (I forget which one, I think about the Normandy campaign) mentioned American soldiers talking about burp guns, but then the footnote said it referred to an MP-40. The footnote said something along the lines of soldiers calling them burp guns because the Germans "relied heavily on automatic fire from MP-40 machine pistols, which had a very high rate of fire and had a distinctive rapid 'brrrrrrrrp' sound."

Yet that sounds more like an MG42 to me. The MP-40 doesn't even fire that fast. As we all know here, machine guns were the primary weapons in German squads and that's probably what soldiers on the ground would have been hearing the most. Yet the book made no mention of MG42s, although the soldiers kept talking about "burp guns" all the time. That made no sense to me so I thought the book might have been wrong about that. Why would MP-40s be so important to talk about all the time but not MG42s?

Upon searching Google for "burp gun" however, I find results that are almost entirely about the Soviet PPSh41. I see headlines like "Firing the Iconic PPSh41 'Burp Gun!'" This made me even more confused.

On the second page of Google results I found a site (https://ww2db.com/weapon.php?q=8) which repeats the MP-40 as burp gun thing.

So which one is it? The whole thing gives me a headache. Some of the Google results suggest "burp gun" just being a generic term for an SMG. It kinda makes me think that during the actual war, none of the soldiers on the ground would have had any idea of what was going on around them, and every enemy automatic weapon was a burp gun regardless of what it was, just as how every tank was a Tiger or whatever.

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3 hours ago, Erwin said:

It does make sense that a PPSh could be called a burp gun because of the high rate of fire. It can shoot 900-1000 rounds per minute. The old PPSh sound effects from CMBB even sounds like a 'brrrrrp brrrrrrp'. That article mentions soldiers in Korea calling them burp guns.

The term certainly does go back to WW2 though. Looking into it a little bit further, it seems there was even a firefight called the "Battle of Burp Gun Corner" during Operation Varsity in WW2, where a bunch of glider pilots fended off a German attack. It's kinda hard to find detailed information about it, but I found an article (https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2019/01/21/the-birdmen-of-varsity/) that again repeats the claim that burp guns were MP-40s. It said, "In nearby farmhouses, enemy soldiers relentlessly fired their MP-40 submachine guns—nicknamed 'burp guns' for their rapid rate of fire." It went on to say that the battle was named the "Battle of Burp Gun Corner" by a journalist from Stars and Stripes.

This still makes no sense though. Could MP-40s really have been such a dominant part of that fight that the battle would be named after them? Why not MG-42s? Something seems fishy. The MG-42 can vary from 900-1500 rounds per minute, so it's not that much different from the PPSh. The MG-34 gets 800-900 per minute, so also not that different. It should have a brrrrrrrrrp sound. The MP-40 only fires 500 rounds per minute, so it should be more like a pop-pop-pop-pop sound. Also, the officers carrying MP-40s would likely not have been firing them very much. They would be busy communicating, directing their men and observing the fight. It doesn't make sense that there would be all these relentless volleys of MP-40 fire that drowns out everything else.

When I Googled MP-40s, the first video result was this:

 

There is a guy halfway through the video who praises the MP-40 for its SLOW rate of fire. He said it was a good SMG because it's simple and fires slow enough that it's easily controllable and doesn't need a mechanism to toggle between semi-automatic and fully-automatic. It only fires fully-automatic, yet slow enough that you can still squeeze off aimed single shots if you want. That doesn't really sound like a rapid-firing burp gun to me.

I'm gonna go ahead and make the bold assumption that every one of these sources about WW2 burp guns are wrong. Burp guns were really MG-42s (and 34s), but when Korea came along, the slang shifted to mean the PPSh, because it made a similar sound. Perhaps this meaning continued into Vietnam, and the term must have been used to refer to other SMGs that looked similar to the PPSh as well. The Vietnamese were known to use MP-40s mixed with PPSh-41s and whatever other SMGs they could get their hands on. If you look at the Wikipedia article for the PPSh-41, there is a photo of a captured NVA MP-40 alongside a PPS-43 and a K-50M, the Vietnamese variant of the Chinese variant of the PPSh-41. So all of these weapons would have been lumped together by the Americans until "burp gun" just meant "generic SMG that isn't ours". Then the WW2 burp gun somehow got retconned into meaning the MP-40.

Maybe decades after WW2, someone was reading accounts from WW2 soldiers talking about burp guns, and they thought, "Burp gun? That's like one of those SMGs right? Must have been an MP-40 then." And then that got repeated over and over and over again ever since. Then once people started thinking burp guns meant MP-40s, they would read the original accounts from the war and think that MP-40s were much more important than they really were, since why else would the soldiers talk about these "burp guns" all the time right?

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