tss

I came upon an interesting AA quote and thought to post it here. This is from an interview of private Saanio who fought in Finnish KvItPsto 21 (light AA batallion) during the Soviet 1944 offensive: <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> It was difficult to down bombers, as they flew too high. We disturbed them and managed to get a few but our real war was against Sturmoviks. Our light AA gun (either 20mm or 40mm, I don't know for sure --tss) was very suitable against Sturmoviks. We had a continuing conversation with them. They always knew where our AA guns were located. They always attacked straight against us. We in our turn gave back to them so that they couldn't sting our troop transports or men going to front line. They had their own rules and we had our own rules. They flew low and always had from six to nine planes in one formation. Like I said, they always tried to knock AA guns out first. The result was that our own infantry tried to avoid our firing positions because Sturmoviks always knew where we were. The Sturmoviks didn't like that we tried to disturb them in their work. In the end it was the question of whose guts could take incoming tracer rounds longer, we or the Sturmoviks. Sometimes we broke first and run to a foxhole to cover if our ammo run out or for some other reason. Sometimes they had to fly away to repair damage and to count how many planes they had left. We downed 16 confirmed Sturmoviks that Summer. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> There was also another interesting quote. Finnish armored AA battery (6 Swedish Landsverk-Anti armored 40mm self-propelled AA guns) were protecting the troops that were assembled for a counter attack against Kuuterselkä June 14 1944. One whole squadron of Soviet level bombers dropped their bomb load on top of the battery in an effort to knock the battery out. As the battery got covered by a huge cloud of dust that was roused by the explosions, the commander of the counter attack forces got worried about their fate. However, one runner came soon from the battery and said: <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> Sorry for the unplanned cease-fire. We will continue firing as soon as we can pour sand out of gun barrels. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> And he run back to the battery. - Tommi [This message has been edited by tss (edited 11-09-2000).]

Olle Petersson wrote: I was originally thinking in the line of playing against the AI in scenarios like; - ambushing supply columns. That can be done. Put a lot of conscript half-squads in trucks along a road and place the ambushers into nice locations along long the road. Whether this makes an interesting scenario or not is debatable. You might want to add a few armored cars to guard the supply column to give them even a slight chance. - Tommi

Jarmo wrote: So, I recon you haven't been up against Jagdpanzer IV/70 either. Now that's a tough nut to crack! I seem to remember one particular Jagdpanzer IV that got toasted with the first shot... - Tommi

Well, my girlfriend's attitude to CM is: "you men play strange games". She said almost the same thing when she found me kneeling on the living room floor marking fortifications on a copy of the topographical map of Taipale area. (Which was a pretty interesting effort in itself, I consulted four different sources and just about the only thing that they agreed on was that there were strongholds). - Tommi

I could now start one or two new PBEM games and I thought that I might find some approximately same-calibere PBEM opponents from this thread. I'd like to try few relatively small scale (800-1000) point probes with a medium map. I usually have time for one or two turns a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't have any particular side or attack/defend preferences. My email address is in my user profile. - Tommi [This message has been edited by tss (edited 11-08-2000).]

ciks wrote: But it's rather odd that a tank who had so much amired mechanical advantages, may have had a big tactical disadvantage. I don't think it is so odd. Compare that, for example, with King Tiger. A King Tiger could cause serious troubles to enemy tanks in a battlefield. However, it would cause equally big troubles to Germans if it had to move 25 kilometers by its own power. - Tommi

mensch wrote: but running off full squads on turn 28 out of 30 just so if he surrenders it does not count as captured troops.... major "gamey" Just about the only army that expected its men to fight in one place until they died was the Red Army in 1941. The others would recognize a defeat and withdraw the troops to fight on another day. And definitely all armies would prefer withrawing to surrendering. If I'm getting beat up badly in a game, I'll try to save whatever troops I can. I think that not doing it is more gamey than doing it. - Tommi

Pillar wrote: I'm looking for Soviet Field Manuals. If anyone can help me find them, or provide a link, please let me know. This won't help you, but it might help someone else with the same problem. The library of Finnish military academy has a whole shelf-full of Soviet field manuals. Some were translated from captured Russian documents while others were originally printed for Finnish-speaking population of East Karelia in 1930's. - Tommi

109 Gustav wrote: 88mm and 90mm guns will not shoot at fighter bombers, so they're only useful for antitank work. Let's do once again some off-the-hat calculations. Suppose that a fighter-bomber is flying across a 500 meter wide map at a speed of 400 km/h 500 meters away from an AA gun and that the a line drawn from the AA gun to the middle point of the flight path forms a right angle. Now, the plane needs 4.5 seconds to cross the map. Its entry and exit points form a 60 degree arc with respect to the AA gun, giving a trajectory as 13.3 degrees/second. So, to keep the plane in its sights the AA gun has to be able to turn with the same rate. Incidentally, with the 13.3 degrees/second speed it will take 27 seconds to traverse the full circle. I didn't follow the turret speed thread closely but I believe that Tiger I's motored turret traverse rate was slower than that. Of course, an AA version of the 88 mm gun doesn't have the weight of the turret to slow it down, but I still think that you would need some pretty good men to achieve those speeds with hand cranks. Supposing that it would somehow be possible to aim the gun quick enough. The next problem is then to set the fuze correctly. You can't hope for a direct hit so you have to use timed fuzes. A 88 mm round has the velocity of approximately 1000 m/s, and to hit the target at 500 meter you have to quickly set the fuze to 0.5 seconds. The Germans had an automated fuze-setting machine that would do it automatically, but the machine has also to be set correctly. I'm not certain about lethality of 88 mm AA rounds against airplanes but let's assume that the round has to explode within 30 meters to seriously damage the plane. With a speed of 1000 m/s that gives you an error margin of 0.03 seconds. So you need a gunner who can estimate the range of the plane accurately enough, set the fuze more precicely than the available technology allows, have a loader that can achieve sub-second consistency heaving heavy objects around, and do this all in less than 5 seconds. As others have pointed, heavy AA guns were used against large bomber formations. A radar would give the first approximation for the altitude of the enemy planes and then the crew would pump round after round against one slowly moving target trying to first get the altitude correct and then the deflection. Or both at the same time, if the crew was good. Germans had _a lot_ of flak guns defending the Reich, but they still had relatively few hits. Some sources claim that German heavy AA practice was to put enough shells in some given airspace in hope that some of them will hit. However, an old flak veteran confirmed in soc.history.war.word-war-ii that this was not the case and the guns always aimed at a specific target. - Tommi

SS_PanzerLeader wrote: Is the difference in the number representations a constant for all numbers? Nope. And as far as I know, there is no way to reliable predict the difference in the general case. - Tommi

Dschugaschwili wrote: and you sadly can't expect two FPUs to give exactly the same results To tell the truth, I don't expect one single FPU to give exactly the same result all times. (Yeah, they usually do but floating point calculations are suspiciously close to voodoo, in my opinion.) The thing that makes floating point tricky is that almost all operations will add some amount of error to the calculations. This results in very unintuitive behavior of arithmetic. For example, x + y is not equal to y + x in most cases except when x is much larger than y when x + y = x = y + x. - Tommi

CM should also include moonshine stills and other booze factories. When Finnish troops advanced to Petro... (oh dear, I forgot the Russian form of the name of the town, I mean that town on West side of Lake Onega that is spelled Petroskoi in Finnish) they found a 3000 liter vat full of vodka. Apparently the Soviets left it intact on purpose. The result: in a couple of hours pretty much all men of JR 30 were stone drunk. Including the commander. Had the Soviets staged a counter attack at the time they would have recaptured the town easily. A sapper squad was sent in to blow up the vat but they had severe problems as approximately a platoon of drunken soldiers arranged an hedgehog defence around the vat. They even put some LMGs in firing positions. It took a couple of hours before the vat went up to sky, and even then few soldiers were severely injured because they charged to the vat with buckets just as the explosives blew up. - Tommi

Fuerte wrote: ]From the numbers you gave it seems that you are using single precision (32-bit) floating point numbers. If that is so, then the fix is easy: use double precision (64-bit). Doesn't work. You don't need to have many floating point operations before even double precision numbers start to deviate. The suggestion of using BCDs could work, or using bignums. (I know that for some people those terms mean the same, but I like to differentiate them). The problem here is that floating point computations are done by hardware and simulating them with software causes a pretty large slowdown. Also, plugging a bignum library to an existing codebase can be a very large effort. (Been there, should do that). - Tommi

Mikeydz wrote: Now personally, I would still consider this a big win for me if I was the defending player, in a just for fun game. Same thing for me. After a battle I know whether I have won or lost, no matter what score CM gives to each side. And my criteria are not the same as CM's criteria. If I have lost 75% of my men, I count it as a severe failure even if I end up having all victory flags. One of my PBEM games ended yesterday. I attacked with Allies over snowy ground. The game ranked it as a minor Axis victory. I rank it as a major Allied defeat. My left wing's attack culminated and it would have been very vulnerable to any counter attacks. My right wing was a meat-grinder that forced its way through German defences in a way would have made a 1941 Soviet comissar proud. If the game had continued for, say, 5 turns more I could have probably captured a few victory flags more but in any case my attack could have continued only as long as my 105mm Sherman's HE ammo lasted. - Tommi

I'd like to add one "me too" post on this thread. There's no reason to add bicycles to CM, because the troops would dismount immediately when the combat starts. There would also be an additional modeling problem because a mounted bicycle squad will be much more spread than unmounted. Finnish regulations were that there should be 50 meters space between each trooper. In practice, the distance would contract during a long ride to something like 5 - 10 meters or even less. A nine man squad with 5 meter distances will spread out to a 50 meter line. Finns used bicycle troops as a poor-man's replacement of motorized forces. Their strategic mobility was surprisingly good with the additional bonus that the bicycles could be carried through terrain that was impassable to trucks or halftracks. I seem to remember that Lt Keinonen's Jääkäri company "Pinna" (literally, "a pin") once carried their bikes over a 5 km wide marsh and then advanced quickly to Soviet rear along a small wagon trail. I don't remember details, though, so I may be wrong. - Tommi

rune wrote: I won't mention the captured French tanks used...there are those out there that actually like them. hehehehe An important notification for all those that love captured French tanks: I just came across a new bilingual book (Finnish - English) that describes the German tank operations of Northern Karelia. The tank strenght there peaked at full two batallions, and a lot of them were originally French. The name of the book is "Wermachtin panssarit Suomessa -- Panzers in Finland" with ISBN 9519750630. I managed to express a great deal of self control and didn't buy the book. - Tommi

Pak40 wrote: Since the who purpose of a drinking game is to get drunk, Oh no. The whole purpose of a drinking game is to get pleasantly drunk while your opponent ends up in such a bad condition that you can convince him to pay for all drinks and embarasses himself so badly that you can laugh at him for months. - Tommi (who is too sensible to participate in those kinds of games but has witnessed them often enough)

PzKpfw 1 wrote: Hi Tommi & Tero I hope you both understand my position in my posts. Sure. Finland was a sideshow. That was exactly the point of my posts concerning the Finns, other then the defensive Karelian operations they played no apreciable Combat role in the ground war on the Eastren Front, offensive or otherwise I would count also the attack to Karelia in 1941 as appreciable. On the other hand, the effect of trench war and the patrol warfare in Northern forests in 1942-44 was miniscule on the grand picture of the war. However, in the end CM in its all future incarnations is a _tactical_ level game and there a lot of interesting small scale battles were fought in Karelia, even during the Trench war (e.g. a battle on an unnamed hill during Summer 1942 when 500 starving and fanatical partisans (on this front partisans were all regular soldiers that only made patrols to Finnish territory) defended against an encircling Finnish jäger batallion over 100 km behind the front line and 20 km from the nearest road, a three day-long battle of stronghold Pallo near Rukajärvi in 1943, or a Soviet attack against a field guard outpost and the resulting counter attack at Kuusijärvi in February 1944, to mention a few). The tactically interesting point of Finnish attack in 1941 was that there were many above average Soviet units facing Finns and tanks played only a minor role on both sides. (Of course, there was also a host of poor units, especially in the Isthmus area and the quality of replacements was really low). For example, when Soviets wrote a textbook on divisional level operations for their military academy after the war, they included only two examples of defensive operations. One was the Soviet 168th Infantry Division that defended the Sortavala area (I can't remember the other). One additional nice feature is that there's material available from both sides of the front, thought Finnish sources outnumber the Soviet sources by a large factor. Also, topographicla maps are available for nearly all combat areas. - Tommi [This message has been edited by tss (edited 11-03-2000).]

Major Tom wrote: They didn't take part in any notable offensive action, in fact, I can't think of one action! Romanians captured Odessa in 1941, though with excessive casualties. The odds were something along 300000 Romanians (pretty much the whole Romanian army) attacking 150000 Soviets. Romanian losses were almost 100000 men in the 70 days of fighting. After this operation Romanian forces were incapable of major offensives by themselves for the rest of the war. The main result of this attack was that the Soviets were worn down so that German Panzer columns could later punch through Soviet lines with small casualties. Earlier Romanian troops had crossed Dniepr succesfully against opposition. And later they participated in the siege of Sevastopol and captured some fortified hills in the area. - Tommi

von Lucke wrote: As far as the man-portable AT weapons, the load-outs in CM (bazooka 8 / PIAT 6 / PS 5) are all historically correct for those particular countries To add one more data point, Finnish PSK teams had 4 rounds of ammo. - Tommi

You can't construct a proper Finland-USSR scenario in CMI but you have to wait until CMII. Meanwhile, you can do what I do and make maps of Karelian terrain based on 1:20000 that are available from Finnish Military Archives. - Tommi

PzKpfw 1 wrote: This will probably unintentionaly ruffle a few feathers but, the Finnish combat involvement was actually minor in comparison to the satalite contributions, from June 1941 - 1944 I'd put the date at January 1942. But that is my biased opinion. Soviets took 513,700 Hungarian POWs, 201,800 Romanian, 156,000 Austrian, & 48,975 Italian POWs alone, and listed another 464,147 French, Czech, Slovak, Belgian, and Spanish POWs as well, compared to 2400 Finnish POWs. You have to remember that Finnish army was the only army in axis side that didn't surrender at any point. Those 500000 Hungarian POWs were pretty much the whole Hungarian army. The Finnish POWs were less than 0.5% of the army. I don't have reliable figures available on the sizes of minor axis armies, but it seems that in 1941 Hungarians had about 100000 men committed to battle and Romanians about 350000 men. Finland had 650000 men in arms (~18% of total population). Yes due to inferior equipment & training etc, Satellite combat performance was way below the Finnish effectiveness but these countries forces were committed much more actively, despite their performance then Finnish ground forces. True. The main reason why Finns managed to stay out of large battles between May 1942 - May 1944 was that Finnish army was never incorporated in German command structure. Germans offered Mannerheim two or three times command of joint German-Finnish forces in Finland and Baltic but he always found excuses to refuse the offer. Mannerheim realised that had the command structure been unified, Finland would have been forced to take a more active role in the war. The decision to stay out as much as possible was a wise one. Finland didn't have enough manpower to sustain a prolonged active war, even Hungary had at least 2 times larger population base. Practically all men of military age were conscripted from the start so there was no reserve pool available. What I'm basicly saying here is all forces should be modeled. I agree. I think that Romanian and Hungarian troops have worse reputation than they deserve. Both armies fought with astounding determination at times, facing a numerically superior and better equipped foe in terrain that favored the attacker. It is not surprising that they lost but they certainly went down fighting. - Tommi

Bruno Weiss wrote: Was it of major significance second to the Germans, who are the other ones in CM2 for sure? Ergo, was it more significant than the Italian participation, more significant than the Rumanian participation, etc., etc,. I would say that in 1941 Finnish participation was the next significant after German and Soviet. Finnish army was biggest of the minor axis armies (in 1941) and battles in Karelia tied up Soviet reserves that could have been used elsewhere. In the years 1942-3, I'd say that Rumania was the most important minor participant. Finns stopped major operations in December 1941 and actually disbanded several hundreds of thousands of troops to civilian activities. Soviets did few offensives during the "Trench War" but they had mostly local objectives (capturing a cumbersome stronghold, etc.) after the spectacular failure of "Thaw Attack" of 1942. In 1944 Finland once again raises to most important minor player. The Soviet Summer offensive at Karelian Isthmus was among the largest battles in 1944. (It was shadowed by Krimean, Bagration and Ukraine operations, and maybe few others but I don't have my sources available right now to check it). The Soviets lost about 100000 men (20000 KIA) and ~650 tanks during it (though they could repair a large portion of the lost tanks). Soviets broke through two defensive lines but were stopped before the third. - Tommi

Hey, if the criterion to add a vehicle to CM2 is that it saw combat, I want SMK, T-100, SU-100U, and SU-14Br2. All were early-war behemonts that were built on T-35 chassis. SU-100U had a 130 mm naval gun and three MGs. SU-14Br2 had a 152 mm gun and four MGs. - Tommi

Theron wrote: What I do know for sure is at the memorial and mass graves for all the dead it says that the city was surrounded on 3 sides by the Germans and on the 4th side by the Finns. Apparently they don't mention that Finnish army advanced to the 1939 border and stopped there (though in few places they advanced few km more to gain straighter line, my grandfather participated in the final attack there that was aimed at Lempaala). The decision to stop the attack was political. It is true that Soviet resistance would probably have stiffened because there was a pre-war bunker line positioned across Karelian Isthmus. But in any case, Soviets could transfer reserves from North side of Leningrad to South because of the decision. but taken at face value the impact of the Finns on the people of St. Petersburg at the time was significant. That is true, but in a different way. The life line of Leningrad went over Lake Ladoga and its end was on Karelian Isthmus, North of Leningrad. Had Finns continued the attack it would have been much more difficult to supply Leningrad. Also, Finns were ordered not to harass the supply transports to Leningrad, neither by artillery, air attacks, nor patrol raids. During the war a grand total of four Finnish bombs fell to Leningrad. In 1942 one Finnish Blenheim got lost over clouds and suddenly found itself over Leningrad. When AA opened heavy fire against it, it dropped the bombs and dived to cover of a nearby cloud bank. The Soviets apparently didn't realise that the plane was Finnish as the Germans were conducting an air raid to Leningrad at the same time. It also seems like the other nationalities were more incorporated into the German army. The Finns were independently fighting as a nation state against the Soviets. Technically Finland and Germany were not allied at any point of the war. I say technically, because in practice there were agreements between the countries but none of them were official treaties. The closest thing was when president Ryti made promised to Ribbentropp in 1944 that he wouldn't make a separate peace with USSR. The catch here was that the promise was personal and when it seemed possible to negotiate a separate peace Ryti resigned and the Parliament and his successor Mannerheim had free hands to do anything they pleased. - Tommi