tss

I wrote about 20mm Lahti ATR and Winter War: Weren't there few prototypes that were used in combat? Answering to myself. Yes, there were. I didn't find exact figures, only one sentence from Järvinen's "Suomalainen ja venäläinen taktiikka talvisodassa" where he mentioned about the experiences during the initial withdrawal phase of the war. At that point he was commenting a report written on 5.12.1939. Anyway, the whole sentence is: "There were few 'elephant guns' in field tests and they were found to be adequate against Russian tanks up to 400 meter range." - Tommi

Dr. Brian wrote: I heard about this book, but have never seen it. Is the English translation available? I don't know but most probably not. It is possible that some foreign military services have translated it but almost certainly no "consumer edition" translations exist. I managed to find my copy from an old books store last fall. - Tommi

Dr. Brian wrote: Wonderful analysis of the battle. Hans Delbruck, if I recall correctly, put the Swedish numbers higher. Thing about this old history, the numbers are always debatable. Yup. My source is Major Hannula's "Sotataidon historia II" from 1930's. He got the figure (10700 to be exact) from a Swedish source: Petri, "Kungl. Första Livgrenadjärregements historia I", 1926. Hannula also used Delbrück as a source. I don't held Hannula's book particularly reliable, since he suffers from same problem than many other soldiers-turned-to-historians. That is, he interprets the events via the accepted military doctrine of his time. Additionally, one of his sources (that he uses almost exclusively in some parts of the book) is E. Kuussari's "Venäläisten sotataito I" ("The Art of War in Russia") that is notoriously bad in some places. For example, the book is claiming to be the authoritive source on Russian military from 800-1700, but the author doesn't even mention Alexander Nevski. - Tommi

tero wrote: Yes it is !!! 0 pieces Weren't there few prototypes that were used in combat? I'm not certain but I seem to remember that. Certainly, mass-produced Lahtis were too late to see action in that war. - Tommi

Dr. Brian wrote: And, they are the only nation to have a dumb idea, like Dieppe? Oh, no, all countries have had dumb ideas in combat. From Finnish side I could mention the Winter War era charges of two light detachments (7th and ... maybe 8th). The more famous one was the attack against Äyräpää church that was portrayed in the movie Winter War. The more obscure happened at Viipuri Bay when the other detachment charged over ice against dug-in Soviet troops, suffering ~70 KIA. (The actual numbers are not known since afterwards the unit was in heavy battles for several days and the casualty report was done after those battles.) It should be remembered that one of the greatest generals in history, Gustav Adolf, developed his skills in almost continuous warfare with the Poles Yup. receded my many years of effort against inferior numbers of Poles who had humiliated the Swedish army at Kircholm. The Kircholm battle in 1605 was the "50-year earlier" battle that I mentioned in my post. Technically, I made an error in claiming that it was the second worst Swedish defeat ever, since Swedish losses in Nördlingen 1634 were greater. However, Kircholm is certainly the most embarassing and the army at Nördlingen was predominantly composed of foreign mercenaries while the army at Kircholm was national. Swedes had an army of 10000 men (I was also wrong to claim that it was predominantly Finnish, that army was formed later. This army had ~10% Finns). Poles had only 3500 men. In the beginning, Swedes assumed a strong defensive position. Chodkiewicz committed a feint attack against it and then retreated. Against the suggestions of his advisors, king Karl IX then ordered his forces to attack. When they had reached the plain, Chodkiewicz committed his forces to attack, and the cavalry charge crushed Swedish lines and routed the army. Swedes lost ~4000 men KIA, more men than Poles had in their army. Poles had probably the best heavy cavalry in Europe in the 17th century. - Tommi

AcePylut wrote: How did this thread go from being about executing my uninspired troops to a discussion on Polish Cavalry charges? In the usenet world this is called 'thread drift'. It is inevitable. The only thing that we can hope is that not all threads end in ... Oops, I almost wrote the alternatives, and that would immediately summoned the evil demons of ..., ..., ..., and ... to this thread. Heck, I'll take lances against tanks over feet and hands against tanks any day. I wouldn't. In the early war it was possible to immobilize tanks using improvised weapons, like jamming a log into the tracks. However, I'd like to point out that the method was: 1) Very dangerous and took a lot of courage 2) Not guaranteed to work. Not at all. It might work, or not. It worked best against Soviet BT's that always had problems with tracks. I've read one description where one Finn tried to stop a T-26 by jamming a crowbar to the tracks. The only result was that both the crowbar and the Finn flew back several meters. -Tommi

Heinz 25th PzReg wrote: The links to the Museum pics are on the top of the page. Oh, the site uses so much Javascript that I had trouble finding the links. I had to go through with Lynx and blind-select links until I found the correct one. Yes, pretty good pictures. Its not possible to right-click on the pics and saving them. You will get a kind warning that if you want the pics, ask and the owner will send them to you. Unfortunately the warning is implemented with Javascript. As I always browse without it, I didn't even notice it. There's no reliable way of preventing people from saving pictures that are posted in www-sites. The only working thing is to put a copyright notice on the picture. However, even that is not a completely satisfactory way since either the notice can be cropped out or it will obscure some important parts of the picture. - Tommi

M Hofbauer wrote: Those Polish soldiers weren't dumb, you really expect they would believe that tanks are made opf cardboard? While Polish cavalry didn't charge tanks in WWII, they still have conducted few cavalry charges throughout history that could be classified as dumb ideas. In particular, I'm thinking of the charge against Karl X's army near Praga during the Deluge in 1650's. Hussars charged straight into Swedish cannon and musket fire and suffered terrible losses. However, less than 50 years before a similar charge had obliterated the defending Swedish army (though the rank soldiers of that particular army were mostly Finns) resulting in the second worst Swedish defeat in the whole history. Only Poltava was worse. Unfortunately I can't remember even the year of the battle but it happened in Lithuania. - Tommi

Wesreidau wrote: Thanks for the tip, but a warning: don`t try to right-click on any pics and save `em...nasty sh** happens What exactly? After that warning I just had to go there and save one picture (though I couldn't find the links to the museum pictures) and I didn't have any troubles at all. - Tommi

Leonidas wrote: The end of the battle should be when the fighting stops. CM is full of complex formulas, so I propose another: battle termination. An interesting idea but I fear that it would be quite difficult to implement properly. How could the computer distinguish between ended fighting and a brilliant flanking manouver via cover? In the pre-beta days, Steve wrote that they were considering adding that particular feature. However, because it hasn't materialized, it seems that there are some serious coding (and modeling) troubles for that approach. In a few games that I've played, the attacker has lost pretty much all momentum and at the same time defender's losses have been too heavy for mounting a counter attack. In those cases we have agreed on a cease fire. Of course, this approach doesn't solve the problem of battle ending when the fighting still rages. And on the same subject. I usually attack quite carefully, trying to recon the enemy positions before committing my main thrust. This usually means that in a 30 turn game I'll almost certainly use all available time and most of the time in a 40 turn game. There have been few games when I've reached the objective flags literally in the last few turns. - Tommi

Skipper wrote: sometimes immediately behind positions of "suspect" units, such as those drafted from convicted criminals. Finns also formed few units from convicted criminals. The experience was that approximately 1/3 of them would either run away or defect to the enemy during the first days of combat. Those 2/3 who stayed were as reliable as normal units. Almost all pre-war NKVD divisions were in fact border guards. At least some of those border guard units were among the best Soviet formations. They were well-trained and well-motivated. I'm not certain if all were, but at least those who guarded the border in Northern Karelia were. However, my impression is that we are talking about situations where one guy would be shot to give an example to a company. There were cases (mostly early-war) where an incompetent officer (most often political) would give an impossible or otherwise patently stupid order and then execute one or two guys who tried to persuade him to cancel the order. For example, one Winter War veteran told in an interview that he saw one occasion where a tank driver was killed in that manner. I can't remember the exact details, but the basic idea was that the politruk ordered the tank to advance and secure a Finnish village (that was incidentally ~10 km behind the front line at the moment). Alone. In dark. Driving along a forest road that was most probably held by Finns. When the driver tried to reason with the politruk, he drew his pistol and shot the driver. Btw, somebody please tell me, what western allies did with defectors at that time? I don't know about Western allies but I can give some light on Finnish behavior. First, it was quite rare for a Finn to voluntarily defect to Soviet lines. In general, the attitude of common soldiers seemed to be "good riddance and hope you are happy in Soviet POW camps". However, there was also the case of Finnish communists who had defected to Soviet Union before war, in 1920's and 1930's. Those who had survived Stalin's purges were employed in the Red Army and fought mostly in Karelia. Finnish troops generally regarded them as traitors and I know of one event when one of them was summarily executed immediately after capture. There may have been more. Those who were captured faced Court Martial. Most were sentenced to prison, some were freed altogether, and some were executed. I don't know exact figures. - Tommi

Germanboy wrote: You both are Happens from time to time. tss is incorrect if he meant to say German arty is cheaper because of the lower number of rounds. Got a short circuit in my memory when I wrote it. I put the blame on complexity theory. - Tommi

ScoutPL wrote: If the primary target for ATR's on the late war tanks were vision blocks and main gun barrels why bother with skirts that protected the sides and road wheels? Maybe because an ATR hit on a road wheel can knock it out and after that you are in a severe danger of immobilization. At least two Finnish Stugs were hit on road wheels by ATRs during summer '44. Neither was lost, but both retreated for repairs immediately. Sure, destroying an enemy tank completely would be the best result but only forcing it to retreat is still much better than letting it stay in combat. BTW, no Finnish Stugs were hit in vision blocks or main guns by ATRs. Two or three had their weapons knocked out by tank gun hits on the barrels. - Tommi

X-00 wrote: (1) Allied cost versus German cost for off-board artillery. Why is German artillery cheaper? Less ammo. In CM, the point values are assigned by effect, not by rarity. - Tommi

Cos: The crew would tend to want to get out of that situation to stop the ringing in their ears if nothing else. One real-life example where that didn't happen: During the preparation phase for their major offensive on February 1940, the Red Army brought forward 203 mm howitzers to conduct direct fire on Finnish fortifications at Summa, namely the "Million" and "Poppius" bunkers. When they started to pound Poppius, one of the defenders realized that the bunker wouldn't withstand a direct hit. He tried to convince the rest of the crew to go out in the trences, but they refused, thinking that it was more safe inside. A few minutes after the guy had left the bunker, it got a direct hit, collapsing its Western end and burying ~10 men alive. - Tommi

Croda wrote: Jason used (in my unesteemed opinion) logic and reason touched with hyperbole to derive his numbers. Others have given here reasons why using hyperbole is dangerous when deriving concrete numbers and I don't want to duplicate that. I don't have any qualms about Jason's upper bound (one of my fields is complexity theory and I'm used to difficult "worst case" results when the "average case" is much easier), except that it doesn't actually tell anything since 20% of 250000 casualties (IIRC) is 50000 and we may be pretty sure that Soviet snipers didn't kill 5 full infantry divisions. Now, to my actual point of this post. When using mathematics and logic to prove something, your proof is only as good as your assumptions. For example, given the two statements: A) All dolphins are camels All camels live in deserts we can conclude that all dolphins live in deserts using sound inference rules (transitivity of implication, to be exact). The error was in the assumptions. The funny thing about logic is that we can also get correct results from incorrect assumptions. For example, given: A) No fish lives in a desert All delphins are fishes. we can conclude that no delphins live in deserts. Now, the result was correct even though the assumption was incorrect. In my opinion (as a graduate student specializing mostly in computational logic), Jason reached the correct conclusion (that snipers didn't have that great effect in the battle) but his assumptions were shady. The use of concrete numbers (here the range of 2-20%) hides a lot of the fuzziness and abstract nature of the situation. In my opinion, if it is not possible to get a reasonably exact figures, it is better to do without numbers altogether. Here the keyword is "reasonably" and its meaning depends on the situation. Sometimes it is enough to know how many zeroes are in the number. Sometimes it is not. - Tommi

ciks wrote: The turret once blown off, could squash some enemy troops in the place of impact. That would be a very very very very very rare occurrence in a real combat. I haven't come across in any battle desription where that has happened. However, at Ihantala there was one near miss when a faustman destroyed a T-34 from ~10 meter range. (He didn't go that near Soviet tanks afterwards). - Tommi

tero wrote: There are several recorded incidents when the Finnish 20mm ATR was used in AA role with some success. There was actually an actual AA gun that was made by mounting two 20mm ATRs onto a chassis. One surviving example is preserved in the Suomenlinna maneesi museum. (I have a photo of it somewhere, I guess I could scan it if I can find it). - Tommi

jasoncawley@ameritech.net wrote: The contribution snipers made to the entire thing, therefore, cannot possibly be more than 1/5th, and 1/50th is probably more like it. Somewhere between those two numbers. Your upper bound is reasonable (but you should justify it better by proving that that snipers were less important than the other things), but, in my opinion, not relevant since it is pretty much clear to anybody that the actual percentage of casualties from sniper fire is far below 20%. On the other hand, the only justification that you have given (at least the only one that caught my eye, I haven't read every line of every post in this thread) for the lower bound is that it is 1/10 of the upper bound. This is not reasonable at all. Then what is the true percentage? I don't have any clue at all it may be that 2%. Or it may be 5%. Or it may be even as low as 0.01%. My point in this is that we don't have any statistics available (or at least none are presented in this thread) to make reliable estimates on the effect of snipers. I prefer using the expression "small effect" to guessing some percentage range since someone may easily make a mistake and interpret the numbers as the absolute truth. On the whole, if some student gave me a proof like that as an answer to some question, I would merrily flunk him (or her). [All HUT cs/ee students take a note here]. - Tommi Addendum: I'm fully aware that you can't prove things about history in the way you do in mathematics. But if you use mathematics as a tool, then you should follow its conventions and justify all constants that you use. [This message has been edited by tss (edited 03-20-2001).]

Bullethead wrote again lots of good stuff: SP guns are arty. They are not tanks or assault guns. As such, they should NEVER be used in a CM tactical battle unless the battle represents some battery getting overrun, or some historical situation where the SP guns were pressed into frontline service in emergency. In my opinion the word "never" is little too strong. I would prefer "very rarely". There were occasions when guns were brought to front lines for silencing some particularly annoying strongpoint before attack (or during trench war, but that is not the point here). However, those guns were brought forward into well-prepared positions and their objective was the destruction of the specific targets. When I wrote "guns" in the above, I meant both self-propelled and traditional guns. Actually, near Alakurtti Finns once brought even a French "Canon de 155 Long, Modele 1877" to front lines to destroy two bunkers. (Yes, that 1877 was the manufacturing year, the guns were very accurate and had quite effective shell but the rof was 3 shots in 2 minutes, with an experienced crew). In that particular case the Soviet defenders were first forced to take cover by firing a 81mm mortar bombardment so the gun crew could work their ancient de Bange in peace. - Tommi

Zakalwe wrote: Apparently one of his unit mates had 'liberated' a crate full of liquor; at least the ALKO stamps on the crate indicated it as such. (ALKO was the state owned alcohol company - responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol in Finland). A very plausible story. ALKO did manufacture Molotov coctails and they put the flaming stuff into liquor bottles. - Tommi

JunoReactor: Trust it to Germans to take an idea, overengineer it and come up with something that completely defeats the purpose of the original.. I don't see how factory-made Molotov coctails somehow "defeat the purpose of the original". The need of infantry close-defence AT weapons was acute. Before the advent of Panzerfausts and -shrecks, the only viable methods were demolition charges and Molotov coctails. They are both useful and one cannot replace the other (Molotov coctails have longer range but are more sensitive to the spot where they hit). So why not make Molotov coctails industrially, so you get much better mixture (pure gasoline is quite bad) and more uniform quality. BTW, I just came upon one account where a Finnish platoon met KV-tanks the first time. Two KV-Is had broken through Finnish lines and surprised the platoon. (Well, surprised and surprised, KVs could be heard from quite a distance, but anyway). There was a 45 mm AT gun in the area that scored ~10 hits on one of the tanks before being knocked out. No effect. Also, on 20 mm ATR fired 5-6 hits with no effect. Then, several teams tried to destroy the tanks with demolition charges and Molotov coctails. First of the tanks was hit by three demolition charges and two Molotov coctails but it was still in good enough shape to withdraw to the own lines. The second one got a demolition charge on its rear deck, but again, no effect and it too got away. The only concrete result was that the first KV lost several kgs of metal of its tracks. And probably the men of the second KV were deaf for some time. The demolition charges were probably of 2 kg variety, perhaps 4 kg. Both sizes were used in the early Continuation War and they could knock out all usual tank types. It was later found out that a charge had to weight at least 6 kg before it could take out a KV. - Tommi

Olle Petersson wrote: I read somewhere that the Finns used to set up SMG nests in the forests, similar to MG nests in open terrain. Here they had one gunner and one loader (that refilled the empty mags). This was very effective... That was not an official practice but it was done sometimes. Most often the case was that the SMG man was the best fighter of the unit (squad or platoon) and the other men wanted to be sure that he remained effective. Losing the firepower of one rifle is not a big deal if it doubles the efficiency of your best soldier. The most famous example of this practice was when Viljam Pylkäs stopped a Soviet attack almost single-handedly. The SMG scene of the "Unknown Soldier" was based on this event. The real event differed from the movie event somewhat. In the movie Rokka and Lampinen were alone guarding the flank. In real life, there were also other Finnish troops in the area. Pylkäs got drum-maganizes to him via a bucket-chain that was formed by a Finnish squad. At one point his Suomi malfunctioned and he sent it back the chain and they sent another back to him. Altogether, he shot 17 or 19 drum-magazines empty, a total of ~1200 rounds. The other Finns in the area also shot at the attacking enemy but they hadn't automatic weapons after the LMG gunner of the unit had died in the first moments of the attack. After the attack, private Rummunkainen (who was dubbed Rahikainen in the movie) collected 82 hat-badges from dead bodies. A vast majority of the dead, perhaps 80-90% were shot by Pylkäs. Pylkäs got a Cross of Iron from Germans for that feat as well a Victory Cross (I can't remember what class) from the Finnish Army. Victory Crosses were usually awarded only to officers and it was quite unusual to hand out one to a NCO. In Finnish army the SMGs were given to best soldiers. It was an honor to be allowed to carry one and usually there was no shortage of volunteers when one became available. However, after heavy battles there might be trouble in filling the SMG slots because of the heavy casualties of SMG men; they got sent into worst places. A similar thing happened with LMGs. - Tommi

Olle Petersson wrote: Previously you could "adjust fire" within a 100m radius of the TRP even before calling for fire. I would call that a feature and definitely not a bug. In fact, I would allow adjusting fire in a 200-300 m radius, based on the figures of a 1936 artillery manual. This could arguably even be realistic, but it tended to ruin the game since a few TRPs could cover the entire front line of most smaller maps. The correct solution, in my not-so-humble opinion, is to increase the cost of a TRP. - Tommi

Here's a link to my earlier post where I gave some adjustment figures from a 1936 artillery manual: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/013842.html - Tommi