M Hofbauer

although it would work and is basically a workable workaround for the notwroking operations/campaigns, it will not satisfy all out of the crowd calling for improvement on the multi-battle aspect of CM. namely those who would like a certain role-playing aspect in an operation/campaign, id est, the ability to follow a certain unit (certain platoon commander, a certain tank et cetera). it would be funny to see Uffz Flitzpiepe in his Pz IV positively get killed (~whole crew is taken out) in battle 2 yet he reappears in battle 3. Or vice versa, you have that tank crew killed yet it magically appears again in the next battle. Destroys any hopes for immersion. That is why the "Against all odds" linked scenario campaign didn't work for me - those which were reported as promoted during battle in the next battle's briefing had been killed in the last battle, and those that did wellwere suddenly gone between battles. It would only work with heavy editing between scenarios, where basically you would set up your next battle yourself based on the outcome of the last one. Now such a campaign where you would manually build each battle before you play it would be on the same fun and adventure level as playtesting your own scenarios.

Right premise, wrong conclusion. All that means is that it is a gun, not a howitzer; guns are not precluded from firing indirect just because they don't have a charge system. They are, of course, more limited in their choice of trajectories, which is why they suffer more from crest restrictions.</font>

Berkut, does it say anything about the other 19 KV-1s? they must have been stopped by something - breakdown/immobilization or enemy effort? I had been wondering how a coordinated attack of a good number of KV-1 s would look like. We always read about these instances where one or two of them get isolated and prove to be sturdy surrounded defenders. If they are always such a problem when isolated and immobilized, one wonders how a full assault of these things would look like.

althoug possible in theory, it is highly unlikely that the 88 gives indirect fire. It does not have seperate seperate propellant charges but uses cartridge full-charge ammunition. It has no instruments or method of aiming indirect. now if someone says every gun is capable of firing indirect it just has to fire at a highj angle then let me remind you that high angle fire is exactly what the 88 was built for: shooting at high altitude aerial targets at over 30,000 feet. to me all the talk by verterans about coming under fire from 88s when coming under indirect artillery fire is in the same category as identifying every tank as a Tiger and calling every machine gun a Spandau. IOW, when they say "88" it is not to be taken technically but as a synonym for coming under fire from "heavy guns".

2am went belly up AFAIK, quite some time ago actually. don't know minicombat, if you are talking about this ridiculous little game used to "promote" CM (actually it's probably more the opposite), it doesn't run on my browser, but seeing that it is from cdv, I have little doubt that it is of laughable nature and zero value.

Skipper, please spare me your cynicism and offensive tone, it is totally uncalled for. so my intial understanding of the meaning of your original post was, unfortunately, correct. Your original insinuation that ukrainians are to be considered russians and that any who fought alongside the germans were traitors is a great insult to these unfortunate people (hardly any survived WW II, because of the war and the subsequent western policy to re-patriate "home" into the USSR the eastern-troops-POWs where many of them were received by the NKVD and shot and the rest sent to the Gulag, apparently Stalin thought similarly to you about them being traitors). To me it would seem that Ukrainians and all the other ethnic groups who fought alongside the germans (btw surely soldiers from these ethnical groups fought alongside / as part of the regular Red Army, too) apparently thought that the germans / nazis were the lesser of two evils, and in any event the soldiers who fought in ukrainian ethnic units surely were not told any mischievous plans the nazi's had in store for their people. besides, Schicklgruber's "Mein Kampf" was not identical with the plans which the germans actually developed for the eastern countries during the war. I could cynicylly refer you to memo Merkblatt 8a/3 and to order HV 44 B / 289, revised into / 292 of 1.7.1944 "for further details", but I want to tell you actual facts found inside those sources: on the paper (one could reasonably argue about what practical value it would have had if they would really have to be carried out in the event of victory), these documents showed and ordered a total emancipation of the eastern troops, which were considered to be completely equal to german soldiers, and stated that eastern troops soldiers would receive share of land in the east (mind you, this was at a time when barely any soviet territory was still in german control). for the different ethnic groups who were suffering under Stalin it probably appeared that they would not have been worse off if they were not under bolshevist russian but nazi german rule (it would *seem* to them since they wouldn't know better), so for those ethnical groups who had some axes to grind with the russians or the bolshevists it was not unreasonable to *believe* that they could profit from the german invasion. finally, a great number of "volunteers" simply chose the relative freedom of being a "german" soldier over the hardships of being a POW. of course, with your 20/20 hindsight from today it is easy to say "but didn't they know what the germans were up to??". but of course, you were not there, not at that time, and not one of them. They were misguided maybe (though many of them were convinced anti-communists), but not traitors. To insinuate that they were traitors is wrong, it is not up to you to judge those people, and simply not fair of you to insult them. [ March 01, 2002, 06:17 PM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

No, I was trying to be funny with the HiWis, having been one myself. But indeed there were polish HiWis in the German Army. Of course that does not warrant inclusion with CMBB. I was more serious with those other (non-Poles) nationalities I cited (please carefully read my post again, I am not talking about HiWis later in the post, but real distinctive ethnic military units). Surely you know that there were many Osttruppen within their own individual units and their own command structure and uniform/insignia/rank regulations, probably more distinctive in uniform etc. than the Poles serving with the RedArmy. And in sheer numbers there were easily more eastern troops than (since I admit I know nothing about the Polish in the RedArmy I have to stick to this thread) the original figure in this thread, and surely their quantity was comparable to the other figures given here. Skipper, why do you think an Ukrainian serving in the Red Army with the russians would be a REAL Ukrainian as opposed to one serving in (e.g.) the Ukrainian Liberation Army fighting with the germans?

MajorBooBoo, don't you see that the absolute number of plants says nothing if you don't know their relative size? one large plant can easily outproduce several smaller plants, therefore the number of plants alone says *nothing* at all. I think it is prudent to follow the example ofothers and disengage from this until the question of your persona has been cleared up. Whether you actually are Lewis or not, you are sufficiently like him to warrant discretion. [ March 01, 2002, 04:16 PM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

[deleted because it was a double post that heppened when I was editing the former post. Duh!] [ March 01, 2002, 10:58 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

Gud: Thanks for the rundown, very informative, and with an entertaining style (loved the comment about the Narodowe Sily Zbrojne ...on which side? Polish "Hilfswillige" in the Wehrmacht would eb easy to do, all you need is the regular german uniform and an armband "Im Dienste der Deutschen Wehrmacht". Btw, on a more serious note, if we are going to have the Poles in the Red Army (I presume), then what about the estnische, lettische, litauische, weißruthenische Sicherungseinheiten, what about the Russen and Weissrussen in the Russische Befreiungsarmee, the Ukrainische Befreiungsheer, the Georgische, Aserbaidschanische, Armenische, Turkestanische, Nordkaukasische (Bergkaukasische), Wolgatatarische Legion, the Don-Kosaken, Kuban-Kosaken, Terek-Kosaken, Sibir-Kosaken, the Turkmenen-, Usbeken-, Kasachen-, Kirgisen-, Karakalpaken-, Tadschiken-, Kalmüken-, Aserbaidschaner-, Armenier-, Georgier-, Tscherkessen-, Adiger-, Kabardiner-, Abchasen-, Karatschaier-, Balkaren-, Nord-Osseten-, Inguschen-, Tschetschenen-, Gadestaner- and Baschkiren-Einheiten, and not to forget the Krim- and the Wolga-Tartaren, on the German side?

The plain 3,7cm PaK didn't get very far against the KV (28mm @ 100m @ 30°). After the experiences in the early war the 3,7cm PaK was given the PzGr 40 with tungsten core. On July 1st 1941 ammunition supply of PzGr 40 was 982,300. Beginning in February 1942 the Stielgranate 41 ammo for the PaK 3,7cm was delivered to the troops. Like a rifle grenade it was loaded into the muzzle and was an over-caliber warhead looking remotely like a Panzerfaust warehead. Armor Penetration 180mm, but the Vo was so low (110m/s) that it could only be used below 200m range with reasonable accuracy. The 5cm PaK was a better hope and with the tungsten ammo it was a reasonable threat to the KV but at the beginning of barbarossa it still was not very widespread. The 5cm too received a Stielgranate, the 5cm StGr 42, however it took until March 1943 before development was finished. What's interesting is that even with the underperforming 3,7cm PaK the unitzs still managed to achieve successes against T-34 et al. I happen to be in possession of the unit history of the Pz.J.-Abt 38 (~AT battalion) of the 2nd PzDiv. They were still equipped with the 3,7cm PaK in late 1941, and only slowly got new 5cm paKs one by one over a long delivery time. They talk about penetrations into the machine-gun assembly of the enemy tanks from 10 meters distance, but there are also battle reports where german tanks aided by the AT guns fought with russian T-34 tanks, where the russian tanks were destroyed and later analysis showed that at least one T-34 had clearly been destroyed by the 37mm AT guns alone. Generally, however, the crews were very unsatisfied with the performance of the 3,7cm PaK. And here's an account on what they did against a KV: "at about midnight a 52-ton tank drives around the village along the eastern route out of range. He keeps turing around on the snowy fields and then drives, coming from the direction of Oserezkoje, on the village road into Gorki. the road was icy and littered with craters, so that the behemoth advances only very slowly. By shouting we communicate with other units, especially Pz-Rgt 3, andplan to destroy the tank with ATmines. When the tank was close to the platoon HQ emplacement, where a 3,7cm PaK is only 10m away, the tank slides once again into the snow-covered road ditch. The tank cannot free itself this time. The gun commander of the 3,7cm PaK - Uffz. Hantsch - had already equipped himself with a T-mine. Now is the time to employ it. Platoon leader and 2 soldiers give him cover with SMG. With three leaps Hantsch reaches the rear of the 52-ton-tank, climbs it and applies the mine to the turret. (now this nest part is for Jeff Duquette ) At the same time from the other side of the street the NCO of a tank crew (=TC), Uffz Kern, drags with him a gasoline jerry can, climbs onto the tank, halöf empties the gasoline can and jumps off. Hantsch pulls the detonator on the TZ-Mine and jumps to safety. A few seconds later the turret is thrown away as if moved by an invisible hand, and at the same time the tank starts burning." tghere are other accounts on gun duels between a lone 5cm AT gun and several T-34 and BT-7, about 3,7cm and 5cm PaK working together with soldiers and T-mines to take out two KV-1s. The diary also talks about how the unit received the first Stielgranaten for their 3,7cm PaK by air in late February 1942. On March 3rd 1942 they improvise a test firing against a T-34 with the new Stielgranate (in Arshaniki). It clearly penetrated the turret. The entry concludes that although now they had an ammunition that could clearly penetrate even thick enemy armor, the accuracy of the slow-flying ammunition was so poor that they could only engage at hundred meters so that they still remained "Panzer-Nahkämpfer" (tank close combateers). It seems the AT crews relied on their AT guns just as much as their skills and bravery to fight tanks with close assault means, namely manually attached T-mines. It will be hard for CMBB to model this kind of combat on a very individual level, and I am, not sure how well the "abstracted" close assault of infantry upon tanks which CMBO has now will work for the early 1941/1942 russian front combat. As it stands now, we have gaggles of full squads assaulting the tanks. Also not sure how it would model the tactic of waiting for the tanks to come very close and then aim at the many very small weakspots such as MG-mount, vision slits, cannon barrel etc. The current model of weak spots only models the random hit upon shot traps etc., but probably fails to model the fully intentional aiming at such locations from close distance. We will see. [ March 01, 2002, 05:39 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

from my limited experiences I'm fairly sure that FBs only appear once in an operation, in only one battle, and do not show up again at subsequent battles. IOW, they will only show up in the battle for which you scheduled them - if they appear at all. The questionable nature of FBs however (never sure if they show up at all, non-controllability if they do) strongly speak against their inclusion in an operation (hard to balance a scenario with FBs) so my personal suggestion is that it is probably better if you do not use FBs at all.

first of all: very very commendable! terrain modifers a must have. different weather will modify the basic terrain modifier, for example, open steppe with a basic terrain movement value can become wet and muddy, or snowy, or frozen, with new terrain movement values. lastly, I hate XML. My computer doesn't like XML and SGML. Seems there is always s.th. going wrong with the dtd files or some headers get jumbled whatever. Besides, a text that is 5k in plain *.txt will get enlarged to 10k in that xml and sgmal stuff. Can your Macs not read plain *.txt or some sort of rich text format ?

I see, and I agree with your opinion that killed tanks should be taken into account when calculating rarity. I disagree about the Pz IV vx Pz V thing in so far as that I think that towards the end of 44 the Pz V took over from the Pz IV as the backbone main tank.

MajorBB, from your posts I get the impression there is a tendency of you to say that Panthers are a rather rare tank? Please correct me if my impression is wrong. If however that is your bearing then I feel compelled to point out that the numbers of Panthers are not low at all. A "few hundred Panthers" is a lot. Other tanks and StuGs did not reach such different dimensions either. One has to look away from production numbers or russian tank numbers, because compared to these the operational numbers of german tanks are always pretty low. What I am trying to say is that the Panther, in contrast to, say, the Sturmtiger or the Ostwind, was by no means a rare vehicle (it's ubiquity went on to be right up there with the Pz IV). If I misunderstood the underlying tone of your post then please disregard.

garulfo, I see your point about the star / Kornblume thing. However, the background is red not green, which is unusual for a police flag (see Frenchy's post). personally I find Feldgendarm's suggestion that it might be a firefighter-related thing very interesting. It ispolice related (see his post), yet it would not be green.

my first post disappeared so here goes again: why don't you try asking the guys at flags of the world, I am sure they know the abnswer or at least can point you towards someone who can help. http://www.fotw.ca/flags/ feldgendarm, I do not think it is a police flag, since although they incorporated the swastika they were usually green, compare: http://www.fotw.ca/flags/de_933po.html

Production The actual prodcution figures for 1943 are 1848 Panther, excluding 82 Bergepanzer V and one Jagdpanther (Hahn). The Wehrmacht had decided that 250 panthers were to be deployed by 12.Match 1943 for Zitadelle. Incidentally, the lack of Panthers was one of the reasons Kursk was postponed. 77 Panthers had been produced and handed over to the army in February/March 1943, but the major part of these had to be returned to the factories for a variety of production faults and technical problems. No Panthers were produced in April. In May, the army received a hastily produced batch of 324 Panthers. of these, 183 vehicles went to the PzAbt. 51 and 52. In June 1943, another batch of 98 Panthers were handed over. Hahn totals the Tanks actually available for operation Zitadelle (Kursk) by accumulating all the tanks (incl. operational and in repair and supply) of the 4. PzArmee, the 9. Armee plus and the independant StuG-Abteilungen. The figure for Pz V is 196 (matches with Uedel's figure of roughly 200). This figure includes 6 command vehicles (Befehlswagen) and 4 Bergepanzer recovery versions, which puts the total number of regular Panthers at 186. Two monthly production numbers which did not reach the planned amount were August 1943 where only a total of 120 Panthers were produced (due top heavy air raids against the factories (DB in Berlin and MAN in Nbg.), and production still lagged behind in September with 197 vehicles. In october the output plan was again met with a total of 257 vehicles. Losses Eventually, the above number of 196 vehicles for Zitadelle was arrived at (see above). On the next morning after Zitadelle had launched, only 38 of these remained operational! The official statistic on losses for the months July and August 1943 combined lists a total of 127 Panthers excluding three Befehls- / Bergepanther. List of total losses of vehicles for the year 1943 shows a total combat loss of 482 Panzer V. Of these, 46 had been repaired again and put back into service. (This fits with MajBB's listing of monthly PzV-losses for 1943 (which accumulate to 493), and since there were no Panthers in action outside the eastern front in 1943, then except for training losses etc. it is safe to assume that these losses are eastern front figures.) At the start of 1944, there were a total of 151 Panthers in the west (France). Since there were no Panthers at that time in Italy, 151 is the total number of Panthers deployed outside the eastern front. What's also interesting (and partly answers the question Tiger pondered about) is the operational readiness status of eastern front Panthers. Hahn states that very initially this was as low as 4%, and later climbed to a more acceptable 31%. Uedel, your post is wrong/misleading; mind you, Zitadelle was in mid-1943, which shows that your reasoning (production total of 200 for 1943, all used in Zitadelle) must be wrong in itself. The truth is that Henschel produced only a minor contribution to the Panther effort, and a considerable portion of their 1943 output (roughly 70) includes Bergepanther. Main producers for the regular panther (=final assembly) were Daimler-Benz, MAN and MNH. originally Henschel and later (Feb. 1944) DEMAG-Benrath built the Bergepanther conversions, and MIAG built the Jagpanther. The actual prodcution figures for 1943 are 1848 Panther, excluding 82 Bergepanzer V and one Jagdpanther (Hahn). (btw, total actual production for 1944 was 3,777 Panthers excl. BefPzWg and BergePz V). [ February 26, 2002, 09:00 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

btw, about those anecdotes of russians carefulöly peeing into bottles because they didn't know a toilet, or about wrapping the lightbulbs. It seems very funny know, but in fact electricity and running water were back then - only half a decade from today - still not a thing which you could take for granted, not only for Russians, but for Germany, too. I remember reading about the early days of the creation of the 2. PanzerDiv., and when the soldiers who were drafted from remote, rural areas mobved into the city and the modern barracks buildings, it was the first time they saw water coming out of the wall (faucets). Amazing when you think that this was only a few decades ago.

Skipper, your original words were "exactly the opposite", and this was in response to a statement that said (quote) "anyone who mistreated the civilians in Russia was subject to military discipline." All I did was take you by your words and formulated the exact opposite just like you claimed, which is "everybody who does not mistreat civilians is subject to military discipline". If you did *not* mean to say that and maybe it is you who is using bad rethorics.

To those who criticize or find un-credible the statements made by some posters here (Skipper et al), I want to say that every veteran has his own individual truth about how WW II looked like. There seem to be few lawyers in here, or bad ones at that. You obviously have to differentiate between what a witness really witnesses and what he concludes from it. The former is testimony, the latter has to be disregarded (usually). When Gunter saw stockpiles immediately behind the border, then that is testimonythat at that day, at that location, there were stockpiles. If he concludes from that that the Soviets were about to launch their own invasion, then that does not mean that the soviet's were about to do that. It is just that - Gunter's perception and believe. same goes for the "driving the invasion back to the sea" thing. I believe him that he believes that. It is very audacious to base on such a statement as a historian the conclusion that indeed the invasion would have been thwarted but wasn't only because some Me262 Erprobungskommande (which in fact arrived a month late) had been grounded. The tales about the treatment of russian civilians is credible, too. To say that all German soldiers treated the russian civilians kindly is just as plain wrong as it would be to say that they all killed and murdered every rusiian civilian they came across. His recollections about their behavior towards civilians seems credible. Those soldiers were humans after all, and when you live and suffer together with other humans through cold and hunger (which were a much more prevalent problem most of the time than the enemy military), it seems crerdible that many people would not eat their ration and let a hungry kid starve next to them. Would you? Broad generalizations of the kind that Skipper makes are a very poor show. Anyone with a sane mind would know that you would have to differntiate, namely between the interacting of German military and civilians in the first part of the war compared to the latter part; you have to differentiate between regular army units and SS, SD, anti-partisan foreign units et cetera pp. And you would even have to differentiate between different individual units within one service branch. If there was a general order applicable to every ordinary wehrmacht soldier that instructed him to mistreat each and every russian civilian under the threat of punishing him if he didn't then I would like to see that. In my studies of the "trial" of Nuremberg I have so far not come across such a document, but I am very much looking forward to Skipper producing such a document to back up his preposterous claim.

Michael, I don't know why you question his recollections and their credibility. They seem entirely credible to me. The only thing that I find stranmge is the reason he gives for changing his name. For one, the term for male goose is "Ganter", not Gunter. Secondly, the term is so very uncommon, that I would hardly associate it with the term for male goose, and I think today half the people you'ld ask wouldn't know what it means at all (conceded, things might have been different in the 50ies). Lastly, and most importantly, Ganter is not a defamatory word and as a name does nothing to lessen or ridicule the person carrying the name. My bet is that he simply did not want to be immediately identified as German when people in his new fatherland Canada saw his name. Not that I blame him, but he should be honest abnout it. well, what did you think where the suggestive term "Volkswagen" comes from? I always smile to myself when I see those leftist anarcho types who are so proud of their Volkswagen Käfer because they see it as a symbol of individualsim, peace, love, flowers, and tree-hugging hippidom. Ha! And I don't even take into account that it's inventor, Dipl.-Ing. Ferdinand Porsche, went on to create the steel behemoth Panzerkampfwagen so very well known to the participants of this forum as well as players of CM. [ February 25, 2002, 09:03 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

wow, now that's crass. How'd that happen? classic three-digits, there's fewer and fewer of us left....