Michael Dorosh

Honestly? What is it you think will be said? Perhaps a pool is in order. You go first with your best shot. I have to recuse myself, but I think a cross sampling of what the community - well, whatever survivors we have here - thinks will be said in the impending announcement would be interesting, maybe breathe some new life into the forum. Give it your best shot.

Anyway, if Bren Carriers can do this, in game, I'll be happy.

Don't make a reality argument with me, Suzy.

No, it wouldn't. It never happened. </font>

My point is that if I said "Scheldt" or "Adolf Hitler Line" to you, you would have no idea what I was talking about.

But do you really think that Germany had no hand in shaping postwar opinion or reflection on the conduct of the war? The struggle to get anyone to think that the Wehrmacht was complicit in war crimes is staggering on its own, even putting aside the astonishing level of interest displayed in the Waffen SS by hobbyists of all stripes. And the post-war Allied apologists who blamed German superiority instead of their own shortcomings for their military failures. German professional soldiers - the ones that lived - were probably all too happy to sit back and agree with them, ensuring themselves of a fine place in posterity without having to lift a finger. I don't agree with your assertion - for a single second - that the "victors" wrote the history of the Second World War; there are more than enough viewpoints seeing equal coverage, and in fact, it is the viewpoints of the losers that seem to get attention out of all due proportion. That the Russians were operationally competent by 1944 is ignored in favour of dwelling on their defeats; that Canada did its part in Northwest Europe is ignored in favour of pissing and moaning about Dieppe and Verrierres Ridge. US fighting abilities in Brittany or the Rhineland are left in the shadow of Huertgen or the first days of the Bulge. If the victors are writing the histories, they sure are picking some funny stories to tell.

Also propagated by SS veterans with a keen eye for history. Not that the Russians did a much better job in their own reporting...

Yes, you are exactly right, and they were still using it successfully in 1939, up to 1942 or so. The fact they were using tanks, artillery and dive bombers muddled a lot of thinking and postwar apologists assumed that the tanks were what was making the Germans win such astonishing victories. They helped, no doubt, but their victories had just as much to do with fragile enemies and their successful use of the time-tested strategies you accurately describe as anything else. I'm not disagreeing with your opinion, but I think the facts in evidence do little to suggest that your opinion has basis in fact. There is little evidence any such charges existed; on the contrary, inflated newspaper reports - and some excellent info on films posted above - suggest where the myths started and grew. Then again, why not let your men know the enemy is good? Eisenhower did before D-Day. Listen to his famous speech broadcast before June 6th. "Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely." Why lie to your men? It can only come back to bite you on the ass. Text here: http://www.kansasheritage.org/abilene/ikespeech.html He was also recorded reading it, and there are sound files on the internet of the speech. Per capita, Poland lost more of its population killed than any other country. The losses were devastating, made all the more sad, if that is possible, by the fact many of those losses were cold blooded murder - mass shootings (by both the Russians and the Germans) and concentration camps in the main. The total according to Wikipedia was 16% of the 1939 population. One in six people alive in Poland in 1939 were dead six years later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties [ March 19, 2008, 03:30 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

Germany didn't ditch a damn thing, that was their problem. They couldn't produce enough for themselves, hence the slave labour, and hence the reason for keeping so many different kinds of captured and foreign weapons in service. Second line troops, security forces (necessitated by their totally insane treatment of civilian populations in Eastern Europe which guaranteed large partisan populations, not a hard thing to encourage in Yugoslavia to start with as we've recently seen), and other low-priority formations (stomach battalions and high-numbered Waffen SS divisions whose racial makeup made them suspect) all got non-German equipment out of necessity. If Germany actually "ditched" anything I'd be surprised. And once the Army, Waffen SS, Luftwaffe (which, insanely, had its own private army competing for scarce resources, including small arms for its several parachute, field and "armoured parachute" divisions) and security forces had their needs fulfilled, there were the Police Battalions, einsatzgruppen, KL staffs, criminal police and other assorted SS minions lining up to get weapons... The list of captured weapon types at the Ludendorff Bridge garrison in Remagen alone is revealing; I don't think they had a single German-manufactured support weapon to their name. The use of small cottage industries meant that even types adopted as standard would differ from factory to factory, either appreciably or not. The capture of the Bergmann factory, for example, meant that the Waffen SS got a nice influx of SMGs whereas in early campaigns, SS units saw squad leaders armed with bolt action rifles out of necessity. In Nazi Germany, "official" replacement of an item was on paper only.

80 year old SS veterans make notoriously poor eyewitnesses to anything, even if blood relatives. Given the relative unimportance of the SS-Verfügungstruppe (they weren't Waffen until after Poland), I wouldn't imagine there were many direct witnesses to Polish cavalry attacks among their ranks - even if they did occur against tanks. Which they didn't. And no, I'm not calling your relatives liars. Yeah, the Waffen-SS absolutely never got a chance to tell its side of the story because no one was willing to buy any books about them, in German or English, and no one showed any interest in hearing their side of things. Ever heard of J.J. Fedorowicz? The poor dears. Tell me you can swing a dead cat at the local military bookshop and not hit a book worshiping the SS. The purpose for advertising Polish tactical ineptness should be obvious. The Germans were unprepared for war and the Polish campaign was a much nearer-run thing than most since 1945 realize. The German Army certainly didn't want to invade Poland, and had enormous deficiencies in transport, ammunition, reinforcements, etc. Their only saving grace was that the Poles were so horribly deployed, so greatly outnumbered in places, and the Russians so willing to stab them in the back. To be able to advertise them as brave but foolhardy was a great boon - much better than saying "wow, we sure got lucky. Four more weeks of campaigning and we would have been out of bullets, our trucks would have stopped running, and all those officers we created going from 100,000 men in 1933 to several million men just 6 years later, well - some of them aren't as bright as we had hoped they would be." After the debacle in France in 1940, English-speaking historians usually explained it away by inventing something called "Blitzkrieg" and saying the Germans had started doing it in Poland. But really, it was just an excuse for their own pathetic military organization and inability to maintain the very real military competence they had striven so hard to achieve by mid-1917. Just about everything the Germans were doing in 1939 at the tactical level, the British Army had been doing in 1918. The Germans were adept at incorporating it into their traditional methods of warfare - the encirclement and the annihilation battle. Voila - contemporary newspapers and then postwar historians had a convenient hook to hang the embarrassing Allied defeats on. So, in fact, the losers wrote the history on that one. [ March 19, 2008, 02:23 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

No, it wouldn't. It never happened.

The military used to call it "dumb insolence" when you showed contempt without saying anything. It may still be in your QR&Os? It's sort of along the same lines as willful ignorance...

As JasonC argues, what are we really talking about in CM terms? Some sort of FP rating (weighted by ROF, bullet size, etc., though in the end what does it matter as it is all under the hood in any event) applied to a morale model and a cover rating in order to achieve a result (expressed in terms of target status)? It's all just numbers, the effects of which are observable...

Are you suggesting that the Germans used M-1 Garands, or that the Warsaw Pact use Javelins, M16s or M4s?

Not that widely. After 1941-42 winter, they were relegated to security duty on the Archangel-Murmansk railway. 25 battalions (each of 30 to 45 vehicles divided into three companies) were on strength on 1 March 1942. Peak strength seems to have been in late 1943 with 57 battalions; by winter of 1944-45 (as early as July, actually) there were none officially listed according to Red Army handbook. What is it you think they transported, incidentally?

As far as the CW goes, m/c were used primarily for Don Rs (despatch riders) and headquarters types for rear area work. The initial Canadian troops ashore on D-Day trained with bicycles but in the event didn't use them much after June 6 (there are famous photos of the bikes being transported and carried onto the beach by the follow up waves). They weren't well made anyhow; the biggest complaint was that the handlebars attached to the front fork by a single nut and rough terrain knocked the bars wildly out of kilter with great regularity.

If you're proved wrong, the debate will quickly turn, of course, to how well it functions. There doesn't seem to be any kind of qualitative measurement system vis-a-vis public expectations vs. payoff as far as the initial four titles in the CM line. It would be interesting to track if there were; doubly interesting to see where CM:C should happen to fall on that progression. Ummm...care to speculate? I have nothing to offer so far as that goes given how little has been presented publicly. Some of the initial posts in October 2005 are interesting - reaction to the map layout in some of them, other bemoaning a lack of a strategic layer but that hardly seems fair. After 8 years of moaning about CM not having an operational layer and finally getting one, seems silly to criticize it for not actually being a strategic layer...but I am sure we will see those kinds of criticisms anyway.

That is because they were redacted by the reptoid aliens and Kris Kristofferson in a secret meeting under the Denver International Airport. </font>

Vietnam era ACAV (Armored Cavalry Assault Vehicle) kits were actually purchased new for the Canadians to use in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, believe it or not... [ March 13, 2008, 05:24 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

Love the weather map.

Again, try reading the FAQ: Q: Did Battlefront design Combat Mission Campaigns? Did Charles Moylan (programmer of CM) work on CMC? A: Partially, while Combat Mission Campaigns was developed, designed and programmed by the team at Hunting Tank Software, they have been given unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Combat Mission game engine. Charles coded up the interface between CMBB and CMC which allows for the great interaction between the two programs and the ability to "share" information, status and results with one another. </font>

That is because they were redacted by the reptoid aliens and Kris Kristofferson in a secret meeting under the Denver International Airport. </font>

Quite possible that "Firefly" was never used either, and JonS and the usual gang of CW Mafia had that discussion here also. Usual terminology was "17-pounder Sherman" or "Sherman Vc" if one wanted to get technical. I have a copy of the 1944 vehicle data book for 1st Canadian Army (a reprint) and the terms Wolverine, Firefly and Achilles are absent.

Yes, I think Shelby Stanton talks about the camo tests in one of his books and may even have photos, but of course that does nothing to prove or disprove theories as to procurement policy. At any rate, that's where I gathered the little nugget which you're obviously familiar with vis a vis camo drawing the eye. At least that part everyone can agree on.

DOH! Damned "spell a you go" spellchecker! It should have read aberration if I wasn't such an inherently terrible speller </font>