Andreas

Italian cruiser Trento - hit by an unexploding bomb at Taranto which ruptured the oil tanks, out of commission for months. HMS Illustrious hit or near missed 9-10 times 10th Jan 41 and on the following days, out of commission for 18 months. Warspite hit by a bomb near Crete 24 May 1941, damage repairs completed 28 Dec 1941 (over half a year). USS Savannah hit by a 600lb explosive guided missile near Anzio (see pictures here. A list of hits of these (which were of course not available in 1940) is here I think it is quite clear that even single bomb hits are devastating enough on a complex weapon system such as a battleship that it will not be operable for quite some time, even though it may be able to continue to stay afloat and move. Having lots of afloat battleships and cruisers with semi- or very serious damage in Scapa would not really do much to fight off a German invasion fleet.

Chalk up another reference for the use of the PIAT as a mortar in 'The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby'. He was also in Bella Italia.

I thought it was one's mouth that is supposed to connect with the ice cream sundae. Could we have found out something about the feeding habits of Grog Dorosh? Inquiring minds want to know.

What do you think of when I say 'Prince of Wales' and 'Repulse'? Regarding Luftwaffe ineffectiveness, the RN lost 6 destroyers sunk, and 19 heavily damaged off Dunkirk, out of a force of 41 (61% loss rate in a situation where air superiority was as contested as it could have been). Additionally 26 smaller warships, for total losses of 222 ships. The French Navy another seven, all figures found with a bit of Googling. If the RN had sent the big ships in, the Luftwaffe would have left the evacuation vessels alone and concentrated on them. Since big ships are far less nimble than destroyers, and bigger targets, losses would presumably have been very heavy. [ June 08, 2003, 05:25 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

To make the Germans laugh really hard?

Mike, thanks for the info on the Beobachtungsbatterie GD. Unfortunately the history of the battery itself only mentions the fight in passing, but it confirms that it went in first, in the sector of 253. ID, facing north. Initial elements of GD in the Luchessa Sector were KGs Köhler (sounds like I. Batallion w/some 5cm AT, 8,8 and artillery) and Wahrschauer (1. and 2. Company of Sturmpioniere GD). II. Batallion seems to have arrived first of the main combat units, and appears initially not to have been part of either of the KGs. It was fighting initially east of Tarchowo-Staruchi, and was soon reduced to the strength of a reinforced platoon. Kassnitz and the Stugs were initially at least not in the Luchessa sector, but in the Byelyi (or Byeloi) sector further south. I am reasonably certain there were no Stugs in the Luchessa Valley during the initial assaults and frantic attempts to plug the hole. Grossmann mentions 4 Stugs arriving at night Dec. 1/2nd from Byelyi.. IIRC, GD also did not undertake the later counterattacks to eliminate the salient. There is a mention that the Grenadier regiment lost cohesion for a short time following the death of its commander Oberst Köhler. On 1st December, when this happened, GD and attached units were actually being ground to pieces, and the Soviets managed to push them back. Only significant reinforcements from other divisions and improved weather conditions allowing air support cleared the situation from the 4th onwards. KG Lindemann was indeed from 110. ID. On the Soviet side, the armoured forces were a very well-known outfit by the way, commanded by Katukov. His side-kick Popjel is very critical in his memoirs on how the battle was fought. Sources I used are Lieutenant General Popjel's memoirs 'Panzer greifen an' (Volume II), Grossmann 'Rshew - Eckpfeiler der Ostfront', a history of the battle for the salient that is also used by Glantz, and 'Aufklärende Artillerie', a history of Beobachtungsabteilungen.

Far from it - this is actually a horrific casualty rate. It basically meant that one rifle battalion of the division was gone in a day, more or less. If you are extremely generous, by counting all battalions except the artillery in this division as rifle units (4 in the PzGR Rgt, 2 in the Panzer Rgt, 1 Recce, 1 Engineer, 1 AT, and 1 replacement), and you assume that some of the wounded can return to combat within days, even then the division could maintain this level of combat only for about 2 weeks before it would be a hollow shell of command staff and rear area services.

AZ = Aufschlagzünder = impact fuse

I'd agree with Hans. High-water mark on the outskirts of Moscow. Lost the war when Adolf decided that Stalin was not a nice man and needed taking out.

I would be very surprised if: a) WW1 Gebirgsjäger had anywhere near the firepower their late-WW2 brethren had and if the Romanian army did indeed consist of more peasants than the Gebirgsjägers of WW1, who I am quite sure were much less pipe-smoking, slipper-wearing, port-quaffing middle-class types than you appear to believe.

Marlow, probably not 100% correct, but here you go. Additionally one could expect the cone to be differently shaped due to slightly lower MV and shorter but wider barrel on the T34? I would expect that part of overstating the effectiveness comes from CM assuming the squad is in a 20x20m area, not nicely spaced out with 5m intervals (although if you assume 2 guys per foxhole, a reduced or late-war German squad with 8 guys will just cover 20m frontage if evenly spaced at 5m. Since I never participated in proper section training (I was in the air force), I don't know what the story is for advance and assault situations. Range, x___Expected hits per man, e____P(hit) on one man, h 50m________________8.2______________________0.999 100m_______________2.14______________________0.88 150m_______________1.69______________________0.61 200m_______________0.95______________________0.41 5m intervals we get: Range, x____Number of targets_____Expected casualties 50m_______________2____________________1.92 100m______________3____________________2.64 150m______________4____________________1.83 200m______________5____________________2.05 2.5m intervals we get: Range, x____Number of targets_____Expected casualties 50m_______________3____________________2.97 100m______________5____________________4.4 150m______________7____________________4.3 200m______________9____________________3.6 [ May 30, 2003, 10:15 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

Since you are ignoring cover, I have trouble bringing the suggested height of 1.5m in relation with the well-known tendency of German soldiers to be right strapping lads of Aryan superhumanity with blonde hair and chiseled chins, and an average height of say 1.75m including boots and helmets. You are not assuming that the targets belong to that famous unit of vertically challenged acolytes of Adolf, the 289th SS-Division 'Rumpelstilzchen'?

Where's the problem? That by implication, and looking at your averages, means that there were nearly 25% of tanks with 2-3 rounds of cannister. That clearly is not enough, and I want BTS to fix it or sumfink. Have you never seen a bell-curve? Or would you prefer that every T34 in the game has 6-7 rounds as a standard loadout? In game-terms, this variance is very welcome, because it means that not all cannister will be used. How likely is it that the one tank with 20 rounds will go through all of the cannister rounds? How likely is it that the one tank at the opposite end of the bell curve, with 1-2 rounds would need more? How likely is it that your opponent obliges you to attack with infantry just where the one tank with 20+ rounds is? In one recent game, I had one T34 with 19 rounds cannister. It was also the only one T34 that was conscript, and it lost its commander through an air-burst, leaving it permanently out of command (45 sec delay on orders). It used two cannister rounds against infantry stupidly assaulting it in the open, at 30m, from the front. The other 17 were never fired. Thank you very much. At the opposite end of the board, my opponent put in an infantry attack when the two T34s there had run out of cannister, because they had 3 rounds between them. I would much have preferred all of them to have six rounds.

The gunshields were really designed to keep out ordinary rifle ammo, IIRC. Also, the German ATGs up to the PAK 40 are quite low-slung, with a small shield that can not really protect the crew by itself. I find the incident related here entirely unsurprising BTW.

Don't be so obsessed with Canuckia's greatness - you are all a bunch of cowboys with 2nd class football teams anyway who can not send turns on time. CEF - Corps Expeditionnaire Francais. They were the ones doing the fighting.

One thing I am still not quite certain about (or have forgotten) is whether incapicated in CM does not just include KIA/WIA but also panicked individuals who are in such a state that they will not recover until the end of the CM battle. These are the cases which von Mellenthin refers to show up in the evening at the field kitchen, or who trundle back to the aid post with some made-up injury (see e.g. Ellis description of the disintegration of 34th US Division in the Rapido bridgehead). So a squad hit by one round of cannister while jogging around in the open could just be deemed to have completely lost its cohesion, beyond the ability to rally it in 35+ or whatever turns you have, if those cases were also included.

Thanks Jon. I am in the process of making all my CMBO scenarios available as a single download, and once that has been done (ETA late June) I'll post the link here. Don't forget to review it

Don, I am also not very happy about this arbitrary cut-off point of 'end of 44' - presumably on the grounds that in 45 the total figures are either: 1) hard to establish because records were no longer kept 2) include lots of POWs in collapsed pockets skewing the figures 3) both of the above This conveniently ignores a number of issues that would show up the Germans rather badly WRT their combat effectiveness, such as e.g. the Vistula-Oder operation, or the Silesian operation. THe POW argument does not hold their either, because in the east the collapse was not as total as in the west, it happened much later. Bottomline is, statistical analysis is only getting you this far either. Whether Zetterling believes one thing or another for the later war years in the east is irrelevant, since he has not got the data to back up his beliefs, nor is he able to get it, because it does not exist. E.g. in the Iassy-Kishinyew operation the following Grosseinheiten were lost almost entirely, and with them their records: 6. Armee parts of 8.Armee: - Korpskommandos: IV, VII, XXX, XXXXIV, LII - Infanterie-Divisionen: 9, 15, 62, 79, 106, 161, 257, 258, 282, 294, 302, 306, 320, 335, 370, 376, 384 - 153. Feldausbildungs-Division Additionally large numbers of Heerestruppen. Some parts of these divisions escaped: - 10. PzGrenDiv - 13. PzDiv - 76. Inf.Div This information is from Joerg Wurdack at the forums of www.panzerlexikon.de. In terms of effectiveness, one can then debate on whether the Romanian losses should be counted into it or not.

Well, I am having very serious trouble with this statement. He is very clearly comparing apples and oranges, since routs of the magnitude of Iassy-Kishinye and Bagration never happened in the west. To make such arguments on the basis of total casualty figures smacks of some sort of bias to me. IMO that is only an attempt to cover up the fact that he is in no way able to pronounce on what happened in the east in summer 1944 with his research methodology.

There are non-US scenario designers though. I for one can not wait to start doing stuff with the CEF or the Kiwis. I also have this nice history of the DCLI that has quite a bit of stuff in it.

Unfortunately we don't have that data for a lot of battles, in particular those that would show very serious improvements on the Soviet side, i.e. 1944/5, thus the statistical data in existence (even assuming that it is actually correct) is skewing your potential research and the outcomes. This is a very serious problem, and one that has to be acknowledged by those relying on statistical data. It basically means that while you are able to do in-depth work on Kursk, you will never be able to do the same statistical analysis of e.g. Iassy-Kishinev (where the war diaries of 6th Army and most of its subformations were lost - there are still >100,000 MIA cases from that operation on the German side). If that is all you can do, you will never be able to draw any conclusions of the Soviet-German war as a whole, you will always be limited to isolated vignettes. BTW - I really don't care whether Glantz' books purport one thing or another by the way. I treat them the way I outlined above.

In reality, you could be an infantry commander going for months without ever seeing a friendly tank close by, let alone attached to you. The same goes for actual personnel replacements - despite the numerical superiority. I have a memoir by the CoS of a Guards infantry regiment that fought with a single battalion instead of three for a long time. That is attacking or defending, just not on the main axis. So they had to make do with what they had.

They did have colour films in the early 1940s or thereabouts, at least in Germany, but presumably elsewhere too. Some select German Kriegsberichterstatter (official correspondents) were given it. Amazon: Lost colour footage DVD

Valera - this is a total scorcher of a link you got there. Brilliant stuff.

Bah! That is nothing on Germans. They feature in 100% of the battles. BTS fix or sumfink!