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Both of my grandfathers fought in Winter War (39-40) and Continuation War (41-44) against Russians. I'm not certain but I think that neither participated in Lappland War (44-45) against Germans. In Winter War, both served as sappers. At the time Finnish army units were formed regionally and they both happened to live in a "sapper area" (Kokemäki and Alahärmä). My father's father and his three brothers were all part of a sapper company that was positioned on Summa section of Mannerheim's line. When the Soviets broke through there their company was one of the units that were hastily scraped together and sent to contain the enemy. That day (13.2.40) the unit had heavy losses, including 10 MIA with my my great-uncle being one of them. Later the company was sent to prepare the defence of Vyborg. On the last full day of the war (12.3.) they were arming AT-mines in preparation of minefield construction in a cellar when one of them went off causing a huge explosion and the house crashed on them. My grandfather and his second brother were severely wounded. Grandfather survived, but great-uncle died of his wounds that night. I don't know for certain what my father's father did during the Continuation War, but he continued serving as a sapper. His military rank was "alikersantti" (later "kersantti") so he probably served as a squad leader. During the Winter War my mother's father served at Taipale section of the Mannerheim's Line. Some of you may have seen the movie "Winter War". Well, that movie is situated at Taipale and if grandfather had not been a sapper he would have been in the same regiment, possibly even in the same batallion than the men in the movie. For some reason he was transferred to infantry when the Continuation War started. In the second battle of his unit his younger brother was killed. I don't know exactly how. I don't know much about his doings, either, but I know that he was with JR58 at Rajajoki section on June 9 1944. At that day and place the Soviets started their major offensive. The artillery preparation was second most heavy that had been seen in the whole war before (IIRC, the heavier one had happened during Kursk battle) and there were not too many heavier barrages even afterwards (Bagration, Seelow Heights, a couple of more). Worst of all, the Soviets had had two years of time to recon the Finnish lines and the fire was very accurate. The Soviets cut through Finnish lines like a hot knife through butter, in some parts the recon probes were enough to capture Finnish lines. I think that my grandfather was wounded by the barrage as he was wounded at least once during the war and his "battle list" has a month long gap. During the last few months of the war the JR58 was in reserve at Vyborg Bay area. His military rank was "ylikersantti" so he probably was a platoon leader or an assistant platoon leader. -Tommi

Those five guys who quit Talonsoft this week wouldn't be heading over to Battlefront to give you guys a hand to finish the game quickly? Well, as Fred Brooks said it as early as 70's: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". Seriously, computer programming is not the kind of job that you can just throw in some more people and expect that they immedietedly begin to do anything useful. I'd guess that introducing a new programmer to the CM code base would take much longer time from Charles than finishing the game itself. - Tommi

Of course, when you have gun that is big enough even a near miss will stop a tank. Even if the explosion can not penetrate the armor, it can still knock the crew out or even topple the tank. I'm not certain but I'd guess that the line goes somewhere around 150mm. At that point it does not matter much what kind of ammunition you use or how thick armor the enemy has. I seem to remember that HE from German 105mm howitzers could knock T-34s out but I can't remember how it fared against heavier tanks. On the other hand, Finnish BT-42 assault guns armed with British 114mm howitzers could not do anything to modern Soviet tanks during Summer '44 so the HE performance is not completely linear. - Tommi

I happened to stumble on an old training poster (or more accurately, a picture of the poster) that depicted the use of Panzerfausts. There was one section that warned about the backblast (my translation): "Mind _fire blasts_ that emerge from both ends of the tube. You have to keep your foremost hand at least 5 cm from the front end of the tube. The backblast is lethal at 1-2 meters and can wound persons up to 10 meter away." - Tommi

I have seen several different definitions of the weapons. In Finland, an artillery piece is officially - a howitzer, if the lenght of the barrel is between 12 and 30 caliberes. For example, a 75mm artillery piece is a howitzer if its barrel lenght is between 90 - 225 cm. - a gun, if the barrel is longer than 30 caliberes, or - a mortar, otherwise. (I have a translation problem here, because the Finnish word in question is not the same that is used for the ordinary 50 - 120 mm stuff that was in use during WWII but it is used on older type of siege and fortress guns.) Other definitions take into account the elevation range of the guns, defining a howitzer to be a gun that can fire at angles over 45 degrees. The difference between granade launchers and mortars is more clear as a mortar (in the modern sense) is basically a tube that rests on a baseplate fires with high elevation angles (almost always over 45 degrees). A grenade launcher fires is a direct fire weapon that is often attached to an assault rifle. AFAIK, during WWII there were no grenade launchers in modern sense but as has come out in other threads, there were rifle grenades that were launched from common rifles. - Tommi

Los wrote: In particular we need more info on the British in this respect, and while you are at it if anyone digs up any thing "rifle-grenadish" on Russia, Italian, or Japanese forces then send that along too. Soviets also used rifle grenades and had at least two different models (one that was launched with a blank round and one that was launched with live ammo). I can't say how common they were, but they were definitely used. I can try to dig out more information on that. Soviets had many relatively unknown weapon systems. For example, how many of you did know that Soviets designed a recoilless gun family as early as mid 30s? There were at least four different types: a 76 mm field gun, a heavier howitzer (I can't remember its size), a recoilless heavy AA-gun (I can't imagine why _anybody_ would think that as a good idea), and a recoilless super-heavy mortar (I don't think that this was a particularly brilliant idea, either). The Finns captured two of the 76mm guns with some ammunition. One gun was sent to Germany in late 1940 and the other was tested here. The gun had reasonably good performance and it was light (some 550 kg). I don't have any idea why the Soviets did not take it into widspread service. And as for interesting AT devices. A Finnish officer once suggested constructing a AT javelin. The design would have a 500g shaped charge warhead attached to a javelin. I think that he had made some preliminary tests and claimed that it would be accurate up to 40 meters. The weapon (thankfully) never materialized. - Tommi

Did any infantry in WW2 use body armor in WW2 (besides the helmet)? The Red Army experimented with portable metal shields during the Winter War. The thing was basically a sheet of metal that was put on skis and that had a hole for rifle or LMG in it. The design was not too successful. The shield did stop rifle bullets that were fired from front, but they presented almost ideal target for anti-tank rifles which penetrated them easily. It was also quickly noticed that the user of the shield often sunk deeper in the snow than the shield and you could kill him by aiming at the snow in front of the shield. In any case, as the attacker came close to Finnish lines, his flanks were exposed and it is quite difficult hide your position when you are in open with a 50cm high metal thing in front of you. - Tommi

"schnell" should be in the game. So should "achtung," which translates to "attention," and would be the voice cue for first contact with the enemy Add to that "Himmel", "Mein Gott", and "Donnerwetter" so that we could play old WWII comics scenarios... (You know, those where a brave and heroic Allied soldier singlehandedly wins the war by ruining a German war-winning plan). - Tommi

Major Tom wrote: I would have to say the most successful Axis commander would have to be Mannerheim. I would like to elaborate the situation about Mannerheim a little. While he was undoubtedly a great commander he was not a great general in the sense that has been used in this thread as his real strenghts were elsewhere. By far Mannerheim's strongest quality was that he understood politics very well, a trait that is quite rare in a military officer. In addition, he knew the Russian psyche as well as the strenghts and weaknesses of Russian soldiers very well. After all, he had served in the Russian army longer than most of the Soviet high commanders (Mannerheim served full 30 years in Russian army before the Revolution. He commanded a cavalry batallion (IIRC) in the Russo-Japanese war and a cavalry division in WWI). His second most important trait was that he had the full trust of the Finnish troops. They knew that if anybody could bring victory it was Mannerheim. As a result, the morale remained at high levels even though the enemy was vastly superior in terms of men and materiel. An old Finnish joke describes the situation well: "Two old-guard Finnish communists sit in a bar just after the Winter War has broken out. The first says: 'I heard that the Great Butcher is waging war once again'. 'Yeah. It is good that he is on our side this time'. " Mannerheim's major achievement was that he managed to keep Finnish army independent of German command and to have a long and quiet period of trench war while battles raged over all other parts of East Front. I think he was just about the only high officer in the Axis side (though, technically Finland was not an Axis country as officially we fought our own private war against SU which "just happened" to happen at the same time when Germans fought against them) who could say "no" to Hitler. Hitler proposed two times that Finnish forces should be incorporated into German command structure with Mannerheim commanding whole Northern part of East Front (from the Baltic countries to the Arctic sea) as a Generalissimus, but Mannerheim refused the offer both times. When Himmler wanted to discuss about the "Jewish Problem" in Finland Mannerheim bluntly stated that there was no Jewish problem in Finland and that the Finnish army would be used against anybody who thought that there were. As a result, the Finnish Jews were as safe as anybody can be in a country that is waging war. As a military commander Mannerheim did make mistakes and in fact he made quite many of them (insistence of quick capture of Tampere in 1918 Civil War, troop deployment in June '44, etc.) and sometimes he gambled heavily (the final days of Winter War, if the peace had not been made Finnish defence would probably have crumbled in a few days) but he made more correct decisions and none of his mistakes were fatal. -Tommi

I wonder how many generals got good reputation simply because they had excellent staff officers doing the actual work. Because of this, I would like to add to the list of "best generals" Finnish Lieutenant-Colonel Valo Nihtilä. Even though he never commanded a combat unit, he seems to have made the plans of just about all major Finnish operations. (It is difficult to say exactly what he did since all plans were officially signed by General Airo.) In Finland the army high-level decision procedure went generally as follows: 1) Marshall Mannerheim (commander-in-chief) looks at the map and decides the basic outline of next operations. (Direction of the attack) 2) Mannerheim commands Airo to flesh out the details of the attack. 3) Airo delegates the job for his staff. In practice, Nihtilä does most of the actual work. 4) Airo reviews the plans, accepts them, signs, and presents them to Mannerheim. 5) Mannerheim makes the final decision whether the plan is accepted or not. There were many good Finnish high-ranking officers (Mannerheim, Lagus, Talvela, Oesh, etc) but IMO only two were real geniuses: Valo Nihtilä and Artillery General Valter Nenonen who designed the Finnish artillery firing methods. - Tommi

The last of the partisan formations were wiped out by 1947 IIRC. Some Ukrainian groups survived into mid 50's. - Tommi

Someone asked about Soviet casualties in the Far East campaign of '45. According to "Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses" the Red Army lost 12031 KIA and 24425 WIA out of total strength of 1669500 men during the Manchurian strategic offensive. In addition, Mongolian forces lost some 200 men in the operation. The figures are compiled from Soviet unit casualty reports and I believe that they are reasonably accurate. I don't know whether the number of KIA includes those who died of their wounds after 2 September 1945. The same book gives Soviet casualties at Khalkhin Gol as 6831 KIA, 1142 missing, and 15952 wounded or sick out of total strength of 69101 men. So in effect, the Soviets lost 1/3 of their troops there. The "Combat Losses" states that Japanese had 75000 men, a slight superiority. However, I have noticed errors in the book's estimates for enemy strengths before and I don't consider this number particularly reliable. The book claims that Japanese lost 61000 men with 25000 KIA. During Lake Khasan fighting on August '38 Soviets lost 717 KIA, 75 MIA, and 3279 WIA out of 17872 men (about 23%). -Tommi

I think that the arguments about who was the best commander of the war are quite pointless, since each general had his strong and weak points. So, how about arguing for a while about the _worst_ commanders. My contenders for this award are two Soviet marshalls: Kulik and Mehklis (actually, I'm not completely sure what Mehklis' rank was but in any case, as Stalin's confidant and mastermind of the purges he was one of the most powerful men in Red Army in '37-'41). Both received their posts solely because they had fought with Stalin during the Russian Civil War. Both had the opinion that one Communist division can easily defeat three attacking Fascist divisions. Therefore, as no enemy could achieve 3-1 superiority over the Red Army, defence in depth was no neccessary. Their vision was that the attacking army would crush itself against the stout defenders and then it would be an easy march to occupy the enemy country. After the Germans had shown to them that their power calculations were off, both supported the principle that all available troops should always be thrown into counterrattacks with no regards given to the actual conditions in the front. Before the outbreak of the war Kulik had used his post as the director of Soviet Artillery to fight hard against motorization of artillery, preferring horse-drawn guns over tractor-drawn. Someone mentioned Manstein's Crimean campaign as an example of a brilliant success. While the campaign truly was very successful, one should not forget that shortly before it Mehklis had wasted 100000 defenders in a series of senseless attacks. After this blunder Mehklis was finally relived from a position of authority and positioned as a Corps Comissar. IMO, one of the worst losses that Soviets suffered during Winter War against Finland happened when Mehklis returned from a front line visit about 15 minutes before Finns encircled the division (163rd or 44th, right now I can't remember which one) by cutting the only road. The fact that Mehklis survived doomed some hundreds of thousands of Soviets to death. -Tommi

I remember reading from somewhere that sometimes Soviet tankers would place a smoke canister on their engine decks and that they would play dead by firing the canister on convenient occasion. I do not know whether this was a widespread practice and how the whole thing was arranged in practice. I have also a story about dummy vehicles. In Summer '43 Finnish aerial reconnaisance pilots noticed that Soviets had built a new airfield in Eastern Karelia. They made a few photo runs and the pictures showed that there were about a squadron of planes there in quite dense formation and poorly camouflaged. This seemed to be so stupid, that suspicions arose. A infantry long-range patrol was sent to look up the airfield and the report was that all planes were only wooden dummies. This would have ended this story if a couple of Finnish Blenheim pilots would not have had an idea. They manufactured some wooden bombs and one evening they did a bombing run and bombed the wooden planes with wooden bombs. -Tommi

On subject of B&W war movies, a couple of weeks ago the Finnish tv showed once again the original version of "The Unknown Soldier". While the movie is far from perfect, its use of music is one of the best I've ever seen on a war movie. The director used a mix of a lot of old military march themes on background. I had not noticed it before (and I've seen the movie some six or seven times before...) that the music depended on the phase of war: when Finns had the upper hand, the music was mostly Finnish or Swedish and then later Soviet themes were used. And it is also refereshing to see a Pz-IVJ masquerading as a KV-I instead of standard Hollywood T-34 as a Tiger gig .

And some accounts say the Soviets lost almost a million men in casualties (KIA/WIA) during the final push that took Berlin and ended the war. I have a copy of Krivosheev's "Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century" at hand right now. According to it, the Soviets lost 78291 KIA and 274184 WIA in the Berlin offensive. Krivosheev compiled his numbers from the casualty reports of the units which may or may not be accurate. I'd tend to believe that the reports were reasonably accurate at that stage of the war. In any case, shortly after the war Marshall Koniev declared the reports to be secret and stated that they should not be published "as long as any of the high ranking Soviet commanders are alive". - Tommi

Eridani wrote: In combat, if someone dies, his commander would at least radio that he is down and the location he fell. He would also leave a tell-tail sign of where he fell for his comrads to find Well, the military records of my grandfather's brother and his nine mates seem to contradict this statement. They all end with a simple statement: "Missing in Action 13.2.1940 at Summa". Nothing more is known of their fates. (They were in a sapper company that was sent to front lines in an effort to hold a Soviet breakthrough). Reverendo wrote: Well, a dead body is a bad thing, but it means some of your enemies are dead and you're actually doing something. One of tha cons of VietNam war was that they mostly didn't find the VCs they killed, so most G.Is thought it was worthless (well, it WAS worthless anyway) A couple of days ago I once again read a book that was compiled from interviews of Soviet Winter War veterans. Many said that their morale sinked _heavily_ because all they saw was huge piles of friendly casualties but not a single dead Finn. (It has always been Finnish policy to retrieve all dead bodies even when withdrawing, if possible). They started to feel that Finns were invincible and invulnerable. However, I think that this kind of morale loss would not happen during a single combat but between them. -Tommi

I think rooftops offer substantial tactical value whether for snipers, artillery observers, squads or MGs Only until the first enemy fighter plane happens to pass by. - Tommi

Tommi, the armed forces of your country are going to be more trouble to simulate than their impact on the war I know. The equipment was so diverse that modeling it completely is downright impossible. Even modeling all possible uniforms is out of question. (I have seen a photo of a single infantry squad with _four_ different types of helmets). For curiousity's sake, I counted the different field gun models in use. There were 18 different caliberes ranging from 75 mm to 227 mm and 60 different models. The most numerous caliberes were 75 mm and 76 mm, both having more than 10 different models. I didn't bother to count the number of coastal artillery gun types, but they outnumbered the field gun types ... BTW, I had a chance to purchase a WWII Finnish 20mm AT rifle this summer. Really cool looking, but fairly expensive ($6000 USD??). Unfortunately, I missed the guy shooting one of his later on that day. That would have been fun to watch! The 20mm Lahti ATR (or "norsupyssy", "elephant gun", as it was called by troops) was a fine weapon and one of the best ATRs ever designed. Its only problem was that it came too late. IIRC, only a couple of prototypes reached the front in Winter War and in 1941 it was already obsolete and could not penetrate the armor of KV and T-34 tanks. However, it remained effective against light Soviet tanks throughout the war, and I think that the last kills with it were made as late as 09.06.1944 when Soviets used some old T-26 tanks to probe Finnish defences at Rajajoki. (The Soviets saved all expensive stuff for the main offensive that begun on the following day). - Tommi

Yesterday I happened to stumble upon a free PC conversion of a _really_ old fantasy-strategy game 'Lords of Midnight'. I remember playing that game for a couple of hundreds of hours when I was nine years old some fifteen years ago. The graphics were truly amazing for the day as the landscape was pseudo-3D and seen from a first-person viewpoint. The AI gives surprisingly good resistance (for a game that fits well inside 64K) and it trashed me _many_ times before I learnt how to beat it. For added difficulty, the c64 version did not have a save game feature... The plot and the athmosphere of the game is superb and has standed the test of the time surprisingly well. The game can be found at http://www.icemark.com/tower/ -Tommi

We are going to have to think about captured stuff for sure in connection with the Finns. They did indeed use a LOT of stuff, some of it predating Barbarossa (Winter War booty!). And a lot of stuff was captured in 1918... Modeling the Finnish army equipment will be quite large task, since we used just about everything we could lay hands on. For example, anti-tank rifles from four countries (Finnish, Italian, Soviet, and British), AT-guns from at least four countries (Swedish, Soviet, German, and French), and so on. Last summer I came across a (quite) new study on Finnish field artillery pieces (Paulaharju: "Itsenäisen Suomen kenttätykit 1918-1995", it contains short English summaries in addition to Finnish text). The book contains listing of all artillery pieces that have been used by the Finnish army and what units used them and when. I don't have the book on my hands right now so I don't remember the actual figures, but there were some 20 different _caliberes_ and about 50 different artillery pieces in use ranging from 1877 vintage French siege guns to 105 mm German howitzers. A couple of days ago I find a "sequel" to the book that describes all coastal artillery and railroad guns in use. - Tommi

On the east front, the only accounts I have seen for turning captured vehicles around quickly was when the SS captured Kharkov I can add a couple more: Finns captured two ISU-152s on 26.6.1944 at Portinhoikka and used one of them in combat the next day. (It was lost a couple of days later for a direct hit). During the same battle (Tali-Ihantala) three T-34/85s were captured and put into action in a couple of days. It seems that in '41 the infantry company led by Lauri Törni captured few Soviet tanks and manned the vehicles (IIRC, a T-28 and a T-26). So for a couple of days the unit had an unofficial tank platoon attached to it. Not that the tanks were too effective, the crews had no tank training at all, barely managing to keep the vehicles moving. The Finnish army was quite special case in use of captured tanks. At times more than 90% of Finnish armored vehicles were originally captured from Soviets. I don't think that it is necessary to include captured tanks to CM campaigns as it happened so rarely. On the other hand, in CM2 Finns should be able to capture Soviet LMGs. It was a _very_ common practice to scrounge all Soviet "record-players" that were found. Of course, it helped that it used the same ammo as Finnish rifles and LMGs. Soviet Maxims were captured too, but they were often sent back for refitting since the Soviet wheel-mount was inferior to a tripod-mount. - Tommi

While I agree that charging with FOs is quite gamey tactic, but sometimes FOs really took active part in a battle. Of course, these cases were very rare and happened only in desperate situations where every man counted. For a concrete example, during July '44 in East Karelia a Finnish FO team defended a strongpoint alone when the infantrymen had fled. IIRC they had to repel a couple of recon probes without support but the reinforcements came before the main Soviet attack started. - Tommi P.S. I finished my Master's Thesis today so now I can once again start spending my time productively, like by playing CM.

In Finland we have four memorial days: 27 April is the National Veteran's Day. I don't know why the day was chosen. The third Sunday of May is the Remembrance Day. 6 June is the Flag Day of Finnish Army. (the birthday of Marshal Mannerheim) 6 December is the Independence Day. (on 6 December 1917 Finnish parliament declared independence). Karl XII was a Swedish king during the turn of the 17:th century that led HUGE Swedish forces all over Europe, conquering and plundering. He was very successful and was one of the main reasons why Sweden became one of the dominant powers in Europe during that time. Well, I'd rather say that it was Gustaphus Adolphus who made Sweden into world power in 1620's and Karl XII ruined it nearly a hundred years later by trying to fight against all neighboring countries at the same time and ignoring their offers for peace. His defeat at Poltava in 1708 marked the end of Swedish power. As an interesting tidbit: the battle of Poltava was the first major Swedish battle where there were no Finnish units in Swedish army (there had been one Finnish regiment with the army, but it had been disbanded because of heavy casualties). Does anyone know if Norway celebrates an independence day? Weren't they part of Sweden's empire for centuries? Actually, they were a part of Sweden only for about a hundred years, from early 1800's to early 1900's. Before that Norway was a part of Denmark, at least since 14th century. -Tommi

Now what really impress me about german weapons are the Sturmgevehr44 (sorry if it's written wrong, I don't bother to look it up). This gun was decades in front of it's allied counterparts in fact the russians made a copy of it AK-47?. No, AK-47 was not a copy of the German weapon but a original Soviet design by Kalashnikov. Sure it was inspired by Stg44 but apart from the curved clip they are completely different weapons. As for SMGs, in my opinion best were Finnish KP-31 'Suomi' and Soviet PPsH-41. Both were heavy weapons which gave excellent accuracy (for a SMG) to the fire. A good soldier could consistently hit a man from 150 meters with a Suomi and in ideal firing-range conditions hits were possible up to 300 meters. The main drawback of these two weapons was weight of the gun and ammunition. Additionally, reloading the drum magazines was a pain. -Tommi