MOS was 71331

Veteran FO teams are more expensive than Regulars. As the blast effect of the rounds doesn't change, what do you get when you 'buy' higher quality FOs? Faster arrival time? Rounds landing nearer the targeted impact point? In two PBEM games, I've had a Kraut 300mm rocket FO with 25 rounds. One was CRACK, the other VETERAN. In both games, the rockets landed all over the place. The CRACK FO didn't have a line of sight to the impact point, while the VET FO could see the targeted building. The CRACK FO inflicted no friendly casualties; the VET FO team killed itself (on rocket 13, cancelling the last 12 rounds in the salvo). From opponent reports, the CRACK FO team hit three squads, dropping four men in one and one each in the other two, while the VET FO inflicted NO enemy casualties. As the attacker, if I'm ever dealt a 300mm rocket FO in the future, I think I'll fire it unobserved targeted on a victory flag as early in the game as I can. Firing observed doesn't improve the grouping of the rocket impacts, so why risk having men anywhere near the target?

Veteran FO teams are more expensive than Regulars. As the blast effect of the rounds doesn't change, what do you get when you 'buy' higher quality FOs? Faster arrival time? Rounds landing nearer the targeted impact point? In two PBEM games, I've had a Kraut 300mm rocket FO with 25 rounds. One was CRACK, the other VETERAN. In both games, the rockets landed all over the place. The CRACK FO didn't have a line of sight to the impact point, while the VET FO could see the targeted building. The CRACK FO inflicted no friendly casualties; the VET FO team killed itself (on rocket 13, cancelling the last 12 rounds in the salvo). From opponent reports, the CRACK FO team hit three squads, dropping four men in one and one each in the other two, while the VET FO inflicted NO enemy casualties. As the attacker, if I'm ever dealt a 300mm rocket FO in the future, I think I'll fire it unobserved targeted on a victory flag as early in the game as I can. Firing observed doesn't improve the grouping of the rocket impacts, so why risk having men anywhere near the target?

In a recent PBEM game, I was the German player defending a village with a Pioneer platoon. I had a flamethrower in a foxhole next to a small light building. The Brit player moved a squad and a platoon leader team into the building at the end of a turn. On the following turn, my flamethrower team fired EIGHT of its nine bursts into the building, alternately aiming at the Brit squad and the platoon leader team. The Brit squad broke, ran out of the building and then back in, but it took only THREE casualties. The platoon leader team didn't run out of the building and took ONE casualty. The building did catch fire. (I attributed all the two unit's casualties to the flamethrower, but some of the casualties might have been taken before entering the building. It was late in the game.) I was really disappointed with that result. I didn't see how the set up could have been improved. I inflicted at most four casualties, one for every two shots by the flamethrower. I was expecting to destroy the Brit units in the building -- unless they killed the FT team before it could fire. I started another thread about this incident a few weeks ago. A few of the people responding said I had expected too much and that the results I experienced were typical.

Thanks for all that info. I obviously expected far too much from the flamethrower team and the torching of a building containing enemy troops. I appreciate the value of nearby troops to fire into the panicked soldiers fleeing from the flames. Unfortunately, the event I described happened very late in the game. The enemy entered the building after eliminating the remnants of a squad defending it, and there no other friendly units which could support the flamethrower team.

My German town defense in a Quick Battle had a flamethrower team in a foxhole next to a light building. My hope was to torch the building after allied troops entered it. For once, a hoped for event happened: My opponent directed a squad and a platoon leader section into the building next to my flamethrower. At the end of the turn everything was in place. I directed the FT team to fire into the building and watched to see what happened. What a disappointment! The FT fired EIGHT times, alternating between the squad and the platoon leader. The building caught fire, and both US units ran away -- and then back toward the burning building, with the squad showing as in open ground although its base looked to be half inside the building. Its troop strength showed 9 okay and 3 casualties, while the platoon leader was 3 and 1. (As this was late in the battle, the two units probably didn't enter the building at full strength.) Is this a typical result for a flamethrower attack? This looked to me like an ideal flamethrower attack: range well within the 32 meter FT limit and two units inside a light building. The building goes up in flames, and its occupants receive at most 25% casualties: four out of sixteen.

I was reviewing some of my earlier posts on the bulletin board and was surprised by Fionn's last post, made over a year ago. Maybe he was discussing an aspect of the prototype game that didn't make it into the final release. When I've tried to move units into shell holes, CM always tells me that the terrain is open ground. CM will let me direct men into foxholes but not into shell holes. Does CM consider a squad on open ground with shell holes less exposed than it would be if there were no shell holes? Or are the shell holes just decorations with no other function in the game?

They wouldn't do it. I didn't get CM until September 2000, and I missed out on months of action.

Posted in error. Sorry.

Do you remember the movie "Battle of the Bulge" which came out in the middle 60s? Telly Savalas (of Kojak fame) played a Sherman commander who wanted to avenge someone's (I think it was his girlfriend's) death. He pleaded to attack with his damaged tank, claiming he could "ram 'em." His suggestion struck me as the height of stupidity. Sure, if your tank is partially disabled at knife fight range and has the momentum to move another 50 or 100 meters to smash into an enemy tank, why not? But if your plan is to drive a damaged tank one or two kilometers to collide with an enemy tank capable of firing AT rounds at you, switch to plan B. Plan A is a loser. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

Given the point cost of close air support and the extremely variable damage it can inflict on the enemy as well as on friendly units, I consider it a poor purchase. The time to buy it is when you're up against a much better opponent. If you're likely to lose without air support, buy it in the hope it will turn the game around. I understand Michael U's dismay at having enemy air take out targets it probably should never have seen. But how much would he have lost if his opponent had purchased the plane's cost of heavy artillery instead and simply fired it unobserved into his deployment area on turn one? ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

I'd say the .50 cal has accuracy as well as power. When I was in the army, the 106 recoilless rifle was a standard infantry company AT gun. The device was double barrelled, the other barrel holding a .50 spotting round which emitted a puff of smoke when it hit a solid target. The trajectory of the .50 fairly matched that of the recoilless round. If you got a puff on the target, you were to fire the 106. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

One common poker line that always gets a laugh out of me is "If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all." In my first PBEM game I had a StuG positioned next to a light building while my opponent had a Cromwell on the opposite side of the building and perhaps 100 meters away. He targeted the building. The building blows apart, and his Cromwell shifts its fire to a distant German squad! My StuG targets and kills the Cromwell. My good luck that turn essentially won the game.

I'd certainly like to see some faster way of selecting units, particularly FOs, when I forget exactly where they are. When you have 100+ units in a game, hitting + or - repeatedly to find the one I'm after is a real pain. One method might be to use Option-B to get to the B platoon leader and then +/- to get to the squad of interest. Option-T would select the first MG, bazooka, flame thrower, FO, etc. Option-V would similarly get you into your list of vehicles. While +/- is sufficient for platoons as they have only a few components, some additional controls might be needed to move quickly to the type of vehicle or T weapon you're after. Perhaps the vehicles should be numbered by type so a + would move from V20 to V21 while option+ would move from V20 (say a jeep) to V24, the first of your Priests. Another useful feature would be some easy way to select a passenger after selecting a vehicle with passengers. I have yet to discover a way easily to select the .50 caliber MG passenger in a scout car. I can't seem to do it from any view of the car, so I find the MG by brute force using + or - until the passenger unit is highlighted in the car. That's a real pain. Maybe the easiest way to unload a passenger would be to add an unload command to the vehicle's command list.

I'm playing the German side in a PBEM game against an American force. A jeep just came into the view of my most forward unit. I selected the jeep and pressed the return key. I was surprised to read that the jeep had a Sharpshooter passenger. I suppose a sharp-eyed observer might recognize a scoped rifle, but I believe this is more info than I'm really entitled to. It would be interesting to know how CM handles Fog of War. When I see that an enemy squad has six able bodied men and four casualties, does that mean my observer sees six guys and subtracts from the normal ten to decide four must have been lost? Has someone supposedly been watching the unit and seen four guys get hit and fall? If a unit disappears from sight and then reappears, how does the observer know that what he's seeing appear is the same unit he saw disappear? Is there a time factor in FOW? Do you find out more and more about an enemy unit every turn the unit is in sight? ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

"Around the reinforcement marker" is right. I've played the Wittmann scenario quite a few times and seen the German reinforcements beam down (a la Star Trek) into the middle of the British positions. In one game, the Pz IV arrived at a point surrounded by three Brit tanks and died in seven seconds without firing a shot. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

While I agree with the limited information FOW provides during a game, I wish CM would accumulate actual casualties inflicted by each unit during a game and display that information at game end. Such data would give us a much better feel for the effectiveness of different weapons types. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

Simple solution: buy the FO and buy an empty vehicle for him to get him mobile. A half-track will give him some armor protection. A jeep or kubelwagen will give him some speed. A tank will give him some direct fire capability. If you can afford the points to give him a full game tank rather than just an quick ride and drop off, that's your choice. I don't think there's any way to get him inside the tank. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

I was playing an email game with Fred Starita, but his email address fastarita@ aol.com no longer seems to work. Can anyone help me? HP

I'm now a German defender with a 900 point force. I wanted to buy a pioneer company, but, remembering how much trouble I had had with flamethrowers in Valley of Terror, I thought the six (two per platoon) flamethrowers in the package would waste too many points. After I'd started the game without the pioneers, it occurred to me that flamethrowers might be a lot easier to use on the defense. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

I'm always interested in AARs. Please post yours. ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

I've had a lot of fun with this scenario, always playing the Americans. The big attraction for me is the combat engineers, my comrades-in-arms twenty years before my service in the branch. I've had a lot of different results with the various troops and weapons. In my first game, the .50 in the building knocked out five vehicles while the greyhound died when it arrived. In my second go-round, the greyhound was the major killer and the upper floor .50 inflicted only one casualty. The sharpshooters, too, have varied greatly in their performance. I've lost the right sniper on the first turn with the left sniper persuading the Krauts that the bridge he covers is a death trap. In the next play, I pulled the right sniper back immediately and got a clean 22-yard shot on turn two into a vehicle commander -- "Ich bin verwundet!" As I recall, he lasted the whole game but was effectively out of the game when the Krauts drove right by him. From what I've read, my tactics have been pretty conventional. I keep the jeep behind the back wall and the half tracks behind the front wall. I hunt the greyhound alongside the building next to the road. If I can destroy all the Kraut armor, I send the greyhound infantry hunting north of the river -- and then lose it when I forget Kraut infantry can carry panzerfausts. I really enjoy this game! ------------------ Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)

It fits. After I attended the Engineer Officer Basic Course at Fort Belvoir, VA, from May to July 1966, I was a certified "Combat Engineer Troop Leader" with MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) 1331. Three weeks and five jumps at the Airborne School at Fort Benning, GA, let me add the prefix 7 for Airborne. After I was made a "Nuclear Weapons Courier Officer" (combat engineer battalions had an ADM [Atomic Demolitions Munitions] platoon), I recall I got a suffix 5, making my final MOS 713315. Nukes aren't appropriate for Combat Mission, so I discarded the suffix.

My biggest disappointment in the VB scenario was how the German reinforcements "beam into" the area. The Pz IV appeared in the middle of a group of Brit AFVs. It lasted four seconds without -- despite its elite status -- getting off a shot. There's no way a German tank could have reached such a position without being spotted or spotting anything. For that matter, the German infantry simultaneously appeared next to Brit infantry with the German machine gun materializing about 5 meters from a Brit squad. Fortunately for the Krauts, their elite status enabled them to eliminate the adjacent Brits without loss. I think the game's VB scenario should have the German reinforcements enter near the map edge a turn or two earlier and then advance to contact.

A coworker who'd been a Marine platoon leader in the Korean War told me this one. His company was on the line. They always had three-man listening posts in front of their positions with sound powered telephones. The posts were required to call in every hour. The LPs were supposed to have two sleeping bags to ensure that at least one man would always be awake. After one listening post had missed two call-ins, my friend had to take a small patrol to the LP to check out the situation there. The most likely was that the men were asleep, but there were a lot of more unpleasant possibilities. Anyway, the patrol carefully worked their way over to the LP. When they got there, sure enough, they found the three men asleep. My friend grabbed one of the sleeping bags and shook it in fury, intending to bawl out all three of the men. The man in the bag yelled out, "Halt! Who goes there?" cracking up the patrol and taking all the steam out of my friend's intended reprimand.

Nobody has mentioned "Attack" with Eddie Albert as the cowardly company commander and Jack Palance as the platoon leader enraged by Albert's abandonment of Palance's men cut off by a surprise German attack in the Ardennes. The best scene is near the end when Palance, weakened by having been run over by a German tank, confronts Albert cowering in the cellar which is the company command post. Palance threatens Albert with his forty-five. Albert is terrified until Palance drops his pistol and collapses from loss of blood. As Palance crawls toward his gun, Albert giggles and kicks the gun a few inches out of reach. Palance keeps crawling toward the gun until he dies. Another officer in the cellar shoots Albert in disgust and then says he's going to call the batallion HQ and report what he has just done. Some of the other soldiers in the cellar tell him to wait, and then they each shoot Albert, ensuring there's no way to tell who fired the killing shot. Supposedly, the regiment was National Guard, and Albert's father was a politically powerful judge, so the politically ambitious officers were covering up for Albert to protect their post-war prospects. Anyway, it's a great flick!