jasoncawley@ameritech.net

Collapsing the distinction between fire and shock does not improve tactical understanding, but degrades it. You use "mass" to mean, effectively, everything that hurts the enemy. Then the principle of mass may be found in every case of the enemy being hurt. Then the principle of mass is an eternal principle of warfare. It is also quite completely vacuous, since it merely says "if you expect to hurt the enemy, you'd better shoot him." The distinction between fire and shock is based upon real differences in the situations in which they are effective. Contrary to your idea that "you just use mass against him, whatever you've got that provides it, and against his mass", doing so with manuever elements only against a tight formation or spearhead, is extremely wasteful and will result in a bloody mess. But that is the conclusion you will be led to, if you fail to distinguish the cases in which *shock* action is called for from the cases in which *fire* action is called for. And no, since straw-men are a dime a dozen in this thread, I do not mean bayonets or running over people with the tanks. I mean close range, intensive fires by manuever elements in tight groups. Why is that different from fire action? Because its proper *targets* are different, the contribution it makes to the entire battle are different, and where you use it is different. With concentrated manuever elements ("shock"), you want to "hit them where they *ain't*". With indirect or long-ranged fire ("fire"), you want to "hit them where they *are*". In shock action, the idea is to fight *as little of the enemy force as possible* at any given moment in time, then to repeat the operation. 4:1 odds 4 times over. In fire action, you do *not* want to hit only a small portion of the enemy force at a time - because doing so will waste the effectiveness of your available fire and blast a lot more earth than enemy. Also behind the distinction is that the usual case in shock action, is nearly equal or reciprocal sighting, that a shooter can be seen by somebody if he can see a target. With the indirect weapons, this is not the case - sometimes they will be spotted one way or another (counterbattery, yada yada) - but not based on whether an FO of theirs can see a target. Therefore, overlapping sighting footprints by manuever elements do not just "mass fires", they mass them on the locations from which said manuever elements can be fired at by enemy manuever elements, which has the effect of defending the rest of the formation. Which is not true for indirect fire weapons - neither the guns nor the FOs are usually sighted just because they can sight or hit something. Shock action, to you "massing with manuever elements", is most effective *not* against a massed enemy but against a spread out one. Fire action, to you "massing by indirect fire elements", is most effective against a massed enemy, not a spread out one. Collapsing the distinction between these two, entirely different tactical realities, in order to save an extra connotation of the word "mass" as always good, is making a fetish of a term instead of understanding the tactical differences. Manuever elements are at their most vunerable vs. other manuever elements when relatively seperated from them, and are at their most vunerable to indirect fire when concentrated next to them. Suppose the enemy comes at a defense of yours with a massed left against your right. He has only screening elements left ahead of you. You have fire support of course. If you apply the principle of mass mechanically as you have explained it, then you would "mass" your manuever elements on your left to meet his thrust, and direct your indirect fires there too. If he had the odds to launch an attack in the first place, the likely result is a bloody shambles, your defenders making a fine artillery target ahead of his force, you reducing his lead elements to the next lower formation size, and your force being annihilated. If instead you apply the principles of shock and fire as I have explained them, you would indeed try to delay his main force with obstacles or very light forces, trying to draw his fire support as well (e.g. by timing when to open fire in various places), and you would certainly direct your indirect fires there. But the place to employ your mass of manuever would be the enemy's left, your right front, puncturing his thing screen and then rolling it up right to left. The result would be you and the attacker "stepping around" each other, each to the others left / your own right. You would expend your indirect fire on his dense attacking formations, and try to draw his on your scattered delaying force by opening fire with them sooner. While your mass of manuever and your counterattack would hit him, not where he is, but where he ain't, and eat his forward screening force in a sequence of high-odds actions. Another variant on the local high-odds action is the keyhole fire then withdraw tactic, whereby one's manuever elements again attempt, not to meet the enemy's mass, but to isolate a small portion of it momentarily, as it crosses a crest or treeline or turns a corner, when it is difficult or impossible for many other enemy units to have sight back. Then get out of dodge rather than engaging the enemy mass of manuever (except, as always, with indirect fire weapons). The principle of mass has a clear meaning in the use of manuever elements. It refers to something which is recognizably the same idea as physical mass, as in momentum equals mass times velocity. It means units manuevering tightly grouped or in formation with one another over the same (maintaining relative station), like the particles in a solid body, rather than bouncing each to some locally useful position like the seperate, bouncing particles in a gas. By so manuevering, the elements of a mass defend each other by fire, since they have the same sighting footprints. The overall formation moves with some speed, the higher the better, through various bits of terrain and because of it through various enemy sighting footprints (sometimes by running right over them, obviously). These different sighting footprints are encountered *in sequence*, with the number of them reached a function of *velocity*. The total firepower of the formation can be brought to bear on each one of them, overwhelming them by *mass*. The combination moves through the enemy sighting footprints and his forces, destroying units proportional to mass times velocity. Just like physical momentum. The idea is a solid moving through a gas, scattering its elements, and maintaining momentum. "Shock". Whereas, the idea of "fire" is like the idea of temperature. It dislocates enemy forces, and has a large proportional effect on the concentrated ones. Against a thinly spread enemy (a gas), it has little additional effect. Against a solid body, and especially one that is not moving and so feels the effect continually over an extended period of time, it has a greatly amplified effect. It forces the enemy to spread out, either voluntarily by orders to avoid the effect, involuntarily by morale effects breaking them, or physically by sending them flying it tiny pieces. "Fire". They are not the same thing at all, and we are not agreeing with each other.

Once again, oversimplifications of trade offs from the "of course I can have it all" crowd, who react that way because they have had drilled into them until the consistency of a brick that "mass is good" because it is a "principle of warfare". Therefore, thou shalt not say anything negative about mass. Yes, one can arrange to have fires all converge on some small area of ground from forces that are themselves dispersed. That is to say, in my terms describing the mechanics whereby tactics work instead of vague generalities, that the sighting footprint of seperated sub-units can overlap somewhere. That is what kill zones are in ambushes. But if you deploy in anything but wide open terrain, in such a way as to keep your forces seperated while overlapping sighting footprints on some kill zone, you will also have many other "be-killed zones" in which your sighting pictures do not overlap. If the enemy obliges by walking into your kill zone, of course things will go well. If he does not, then the seperation of your forces will mean seperation of the enemies each can see, and thus lay your men open to overmatched, high odds fights in sequence. Nor is the straw man about "100 men marching shoulder to shoulder" remotely connected to any of the above. Nobody is talking about such deployments. But actual infantry deployments in tight terrain get plenty tight. As an example, consider X-Ray in the Ia Drang in Vietnam, 1965. The entire clearing measured 100 yards by 40-100, narrowing at one end in a mix between a triangle shape and a flattened quadrangle. The men deployed there, when actually fighting for the landing zone, were no more than 50 yards off the clearing - which was widdened somewhat in some places, however. The total area was thus about 10 acres, or roughly two football fields on a side - 300 at the utmost, when most extended into the trees off the clearing. Into that space the U.S. army packed 4 rifle companies, a weapons company, and a headquarters company - somewhat understrength, but amounting to ~600-750 men at various points in the 3-day battle. In a position very much like one fellow on this threads, supposedly laughable, surrounded example. They were attacked by an entire NVA regiment, plus one VC battalion in support - around 2000 men. In CM terms, the U.S. force would occupy only a small area on a small map, with the NVA having the rest to manuever through. But the NVA had no heavy weapons larger than RPGs - a few mortars but they were soon silenced by vastly superior U.S. fire support, or by expending their available ammo. And once that happened, the U.S. deployment was entirely correct, because it would prevent the NVA from achieving effective mass. Without access to the areas of open ground across the clearing, fields of fire would be extremely restricted. The NVA could therefore only mass fires by massing men along one section of the perimeter, leaving others thinly covered. This did allow them to get local odds sufficient to penetrate the U.S. infantry positions on one occasion, practically destroying one U.S. company in the process. But it also meant that to achieve this, they had to present massed targets to U.S. fire support. Besides intermittment helicopter gunships and a stream of fighter-bombers in the daytime, and a few mortars that could not easily be resupplied, the bulk of that fire support was provided by 4 batteries of 105mm, 24 guns in all, located at a neighboring fire base. Which between them fired more than 18,000 rounds over 53 straight hours at the X-Ray perimeter. Take the area of a small CM map, and exempt one corner of it. Over the rest of the map, fire 4x105 FO artillery for about 250 CM turns - or use 20 of them for 50 turns in 5 different areas - the idea is to see the size of pattern 4 batteries will create - to see the shell blanket involved. Notice, however, that still involves firing only a fraction of the time, on call - as directed, over a 53 hour period. Now, achieve "mass" under that blanket of fire. Obviously, the NVA should not have attacked a compact formation like that, in terrain so restricted that they could not concentrate their fires from a distance. The French deployment at Dien Bien Phu was over a larger area, and better dug-in with overhead cover in log-and-sand bag bunkers. But the Viet Minh had the ability to avoid concentrated attack and just plaster them with ranged artillery fire first, for an extended period, and thus easily won. If they had the same capability at X-Ray, and had refrained from massed attack while awaiting the results of using ranged fire, the U.S. would have been clobbered. Another fellow on the thread made the comment that when to mass and when not to is an art and difficult to specify in advance. Exactly, that is what I am trying to say. But that "when" can be analysed a bit - not to the point of saying exactly when, and certainly not in any flip and glib "I can have it all, never concentrated but always massed-fire because everyone is always in my ambush zone and no where else" poppycock. Instead, the factors that go into the trade off can be explained, and then the commander's problem is to assess those in his actual situation (forces, terrain, fire vs. close combat capabilities and vunerabilities, intel about enemy deployments and plans, etc). And to decide how to deploy and how to change deployments with pre-planned manuevers, as the above factors change. I again specify the factors I am talking about. The overlap or lack thereof of the sighting footprints of the sub-units of one's command, is the principle item that needs to be looked at. Areas in which the sighting footprints of most of the force overlap, one has "effective mass" against. Areas in which the sighting footprints of ones sub-units are distinct, one is "effectively seperable". Not seperated, because there may be no enemy in the location, or not an adequate force there to overwhelm your units that can see the spot. But seperable, because a concentrated deployment of enemy forces in such a location, would allow him massed fires on your units that can see the spot, with only a portion of your force able to respond. By putting the issue in terms of the sighting footprints, the way the decision will be effected by terrain or effective ranges of weapons or effective lethality of weapons compared to manuevering speeds, and effectiveness of ranged area fire weapons against one's forces, can all be analyzed properly, which a fixed rule on distances between units (for example) would not do. Incidentally, the different effects of particular configurations of forces - like a previous poster's surround example - will vary. Contrary to a naive expectation, whether the compact group in the middle or the dispersed ring around them is in the worse position, depends on such factors. If the scale is tactical, and unit ranges and fields of fire reach clear across the surrounded body, and indirect fires can plaster the entire group, and weapon lethalities are high compared to manuever speeds, then obviously the surrounded men are dead as doornails - which is obviously what the original poster "meant". But if the terrain does not allow such fires across the surrounded group and makes ranges short, and the surrounders do not have effective area fire weapons, while the compact group does, then the guys inside the perimeter may be sitting pretty - as they were at X-Ray. If the scale is operational, and weapon lethalities are high and effective indirect fire weapons are available, then the surrounders again have the whip hand - as they did in the Kiev pocket, for example. But if weapons lethalities and ranges are low, concentrated forces are needed to fight forces of similar size, and no operational-scale indirect fire weapons exist, then the body in the middle has "central positioning" and can defeat the surrounding forces in detail - like Napoleon marching into Germany territory in 1806, trying to "get surrounded" because that meant a divided enemy before battle. It is not a question of magic deployment formations of one's own men, or even of magic deployments of one's own men relative to the enemy's. It is not a matter of "concentrated is good", nor bad, nor unimportant because "mass" can magically be achieved without any regard for concentration, which it cannot, against one's entire sighting footprint. It is a matter of a *trade-off* between vunerablility to *shock* action by the concentrated direct and relatively short-range fires of enemy manuever elements, and vunerability to *fire* action by enemy indirect or long-ranged fires. You cannot be invunerable to both. But you can judge which the enemy is now vunerable to, where, and how to grasp and exploit that. Last, I would make a point about avoiding question-begging and idea-limiting use of tactical terms, which the idea that "term A" "is good" will always lead to. Any term that has a clear and definite tactical meaning and refers to any variable really in a commander's choice, will have times and situations in which it covers the right thing to do, and times and situations in which it does not. There are only two ways of dealing with this fact, which the complexity of tactical situations will automatically bring about. Either one retains a word's "desireable" connotation, at the cost of making slippery and indefinite what it means, until it blurs out into "do the right thing whatever that is" - *or* - one retains a word's specific content, in which case there will be cases in which the "principle" it refers to does not apply, and the other side of some trade-off matters more. Thus, "mass" can mean the clear possibility of giving your units very similar sighting footprints to allow them all to protect each other by shooting anyone who can shoot at one of them. Or it can mean a more nebulous "don't waste forces on frivilous and inessential side-shows", in which the (mis)"use" is defined by its being ineffective, thus conceptually reducing "the principle of mass" to "do the right thing, not the wrong one", and thus making it vague and practically meaningless. The former choice will involve admitting that mass is part of a trade off, not always and everywhere desireable, but an important principle of limited application in definite situations. Those situations and the reasons it matters in them, can be analysed. The other choice will leave "the principle of mass" always applying and always being "good". At the cost of draining it of clear meaning, ability to be analysed, etc. It is quite obvious to me that the former procedure is the correct one, and the latter a bit of sophistry. But if one is drilling 10,000 stubborn men in tactical principles, it may be it will stick in their heads more easily if they are given eternal truths, which in reality may be as vague as you please, which they can cling to and reiterate over and over, than if you expect every one of them to understand why it is true, when it is true, and its limits, in purely analytical terms. If they are all thinking of the issue as one of trade offs, for example, they may all tend, in practice, to an error on the same side. (Diversion of effort, or trying to cover everything, e.g.). Then emphasizing the other side might be more sensible as training. But that question is seperate from the analytical question, of when closely-overlapping sighting footprints are desirable even at the cost of greater indirect fire vunerability, and when they are not.

I disagree with the common statement that the first 20 minutes were realistic. They were realistically bloody, yes (only about 1/3rd of the opening wave made it to the wall behind the bluff, just across the beach), and the overwhelming sense in that is right. Some people react to that as more realism, as though nothing else is involved. But they have drastically simplified what was going on for the purpose of fitting it into a movie. The supporting arms are largely missing. For instance, more U.S. soldiers were killed or wounded by mortar fire on Omaha beach than by machineguns - many of them while sheltering behind the sea wall, some by hits on or near the landing craft or crossing the beach proper. They don't show it because it took longer, basically. While on the other side, the U.S. sent several battalions of "swimming" tanks to support the men on the beach, in the first wave. Some of them sank in the surf, and others were blasted by German guns, but a number were operating along the beach, shooting back at the machinegun nests. And destroyers came in to 400 yards off the beach, when they saw how bad things were, to plaster the bunkers with 5 inch guns. The preliminary bombardment was also missing, and with it the sense that an enourmous weight of material was being thrown at the defenders, before the first ramp dropped. All of the above help to account for the numerous places along the beach where the men who reached the seawall were able to push on up the bluffs and inland later on, and for the parts of the beach were people got across it alive - and also why that, not just reaching the seawall, was the real problem on Omaha. By comparison, SPR gives the impression of the infantry going in first and unsupported on the impossible task of wading through the surf and crossing the wide beach while being machinegunned. Unsupported they were not. The machinegunners shooting them were not untouched and waiting for them, but rocked about by bombardment and digging themselves out of their bunkers to rush the guns into their firing positions. All too complicated, in the minds of the movie-makers, for Joe Citizen to follow or comprehend. Which is entirely wrong in my opinion. People would make an imaginative effort to comprehend it, and oversimplifying it was in some ways falsifying it. Instead we get the WW I "over the top" cliche with water on the way, and nothing else. Just flat isn't true, that is not what happened. As for the rest of the movie's combat scenes, the typical problems with movies are there. It stands out when they instead get something right. An example is the difficulty of seeing anything while at ground-creeping level, in the machinegun nest scenes (not the scene as a whole, but that aspect of it). In the town fighting, the main problem seen over and over is the ranges are too short (most of the time) and the opposing sides too easy to see, doubtless because of the needs of the camera (to get everything happening into one field of view, but also close up to see things). Others have already pointed out the numerous ways in which doctrine is wrong (tanks leading, etc) in the closing battle scenes, so I needn't dwell on them.

I have no idea what BTS intended, being neither their employee nor clairvoyant. But mines inside of buildings were a common tactic in WW II. If they did not "mean" to "model" them or something like them, then they should. Certainly, no CM player should have the sense, as he runs a squad toward a building, "whew, at least there won't be any mines in there". Incidentally, there should be more mines in CM, and fewer Jadgtigers. Last I checked, the number of the latter made, barely had 3 digits, while the number of the former deployed by the Germans alone, had 8 digits.

I said - "not only are they not truly contradictory, they only work at all because of each other." Apparently I have not been understood. But you still think "mass" can be effected without violating "spread". Well it can't. Massing of fires on one target or one area of ground is certainly possible, and the latter is a common defensive principle ("kill zones", yada yada). But concentration achieves similarity and overlap in the "sighting footprints" of the elements of the force, and spreading does not do so. And the most important effects of the principle of mass stem from that. By the sighting footprint of a unit, I mean all the locations that can see that unit at a moment in time. A unit on an unwooded forward slope or "military crest" has an enourmous sighting footprint, for example, while a unit well behind two buldings and looking between them has a very small sighting footprint in that direction. When a force is concentrated, the sum of the sighting footprints of all of its units, will not be appreciably larger than the sighting footprint of one unit within the formation. There are exceptions to this, and they are key tactical situations to understand when they arise (crossing a crest, aligning along or across a woodline, etc), but the general rule holds. When a force is more seperated, the sighting footprint of all of its units combined, will generally be much larger than the sighting footprint of a single unit within the formation. Parts of the unit can see the west side of hill xyz. Others can see the adjoining southern slope of the ridge leading to it. Others can see the draw leading off to the east instead. Etc. The units may all have LOS of one another, and of the areas in the immediate vicinity of the other parts of the formation or at least some of them. That is not the question. The issue is the differential sighting footprints of the sub-units, and the spread or concentration of the formation. When the unit is deployed in a concentrated enough fashion that its overall sighting footprint is about the same as that of each of its sub-units, then the formation call all put fire on anything that can put fire on a part of the formation. This is the principle tactical reality that gives rise to the phenomenon of "mass". When part of the unit gets into a firefight, the rest of the unit shoots up those shooting at a piece of it. But unless the ground is very open (and at the limit, even then as I will explain), this overlap of sighting footprints only happens with deployments so tight, that the whole unit makes a fine artillery target. This is especially true for any force with sub-units besides heavy armor, tanks - in the period in question. (These days, it even applies to tanks against high-tech enemies, although still somewhat less than with other types). I can show why this is so with the marginal case. Imagine the unit is on an entirely flat, open plain with a visibility of 3 kilometers in every direction, ending afterward because of dust or whatever. As often occurs in the desert. Does this mean the force has "mass" in every direction? It depends on how it is deployed. Imagine the force is deployed in a single line of vehicles stretched out across the direction they are advancing, 2 kilometers long. Then an enemy 2-3 kilometers to the right sees the right half of the unit (and vice versa), while an enemy 2-3 kilometers to the left sees the left half of the unit. The sighting footprints overlap considerably, especially toward the front. But not in all directions equally. Deploy the unit tighter, into .5 kilometer on a side, and this "edges" sight effect is reduced considerably, so that "mass" will be more likely against enemies encountered from any angle. But, now the entire formation sits in the approximate footprint of a single MLRS strike. Instead of a modern armor example, take a CM scale infantry one. Suppose you have a force of infantry - a platoon to make it simple - moving through a bodies of woods, with visibility 25 meters. If the squads are "on-line" side by side and 20 meters apart, then enemies encountering the left or right squad will in general not be visible to the rest of the platoon immediately. In a wedge formation, it will be a bit better - 2 squads will typically have or soon get LOS to any enemy encountered. But the platoon will have to be deployed in an area 50 meters across by perhaps 40 meters deep, to bring about this level of overlap of sighting footprints and so of fire. Any artillery fire will tree-burst over the entire platoon, with tons of room to spare. Indeed, any deployment of an infantry *company* in such terrain, will either be subject to meeting enemy infantry seperated and fighting them with only a small portion of the force, or to concentrated damage from artillery fire, and often both. Incidentally, this is one reason the Hurtgen was so bloody a battle. Any deployment of men that does not give the enemy fine artillery targets, involves spreading out the sub-units until only a couple are within the footprint of a possible enemy barrage. But such deployments are very loose in all but very open terrain. They will always involve some men passing on this side of a building or wood or hill, others on that side of it. In all but continuous woods (whose problems have already been covered above), there will also be avenues of open ground between the sub-units of any force deployed that loosely. Now, when there are many avenues of open ground that "bisect" an infantry formation, that means there are many possible locations for enemy MGs that will effectively divide the formation, by preventing anyone from crossing that area of open ground, or pinning or breaking them if they try it. So mutual support, even by fire, often cannot be restored by running people to the direction of the main contact. Sometimes, not always. Why does this matter? Because a force that is engaged while divided by some LOS-blocking obstacle can only put a portion of its fires on the enemy. Who may be able to put all his fires on only that portion, in return (a few pinning MGs to "disarticulate" the force, excepted). I am trying to explain some of the effects of being spread out enough to be a poor artillery target. It will always create opportunities for an enemy to engage a portion of your force, only. He can isolate some element by choice of his location and the restrictions on his sighting footprint. If your men are not quite close to one another, he is reasonably assured of chances to do this. You say at one point "I'd prefer to take the occasional losses to artillery than the effects of being split up". Well, many historical commanders have agreed with you, which is why artillery is still called the King of Battle, and why it caused something north of 3/4ths of all casualties in WW II. The losses to artillery from being concentrated are not "occasional". Commanders used to modern U.S. fire support dominance in all recent wars often do not understand this, but you can bet our more capable opponents did and do. But the point is not that "therefore, you must spread". The point is to understand why concentrated deployments employed for "shock" or against thinner enemies can indeed prove decisive, and how - equally - a correctly arranged plan of fire against such a concentrated force can also prove decisive. These issues will never be understood by anyone who thinks in terms of "concentration - good" or "concentration - bad", by calling the first "mass" and the second "bunching up". It is a question of the situation. When the enemy is concentrated, one does not try to destroy him with a spearhead. Shoot him with indirect fire, and he will die. Attack afterward; in the meantime avoid losses in dead ground and get closer. When the enemy is spread out, do not fight 4 small battles side by side and burn your fire support on whatever holds anyone up. Form a spearhead and destroy half the spread-out enemy force in 2 lopsided firefights in sequence, instead. But keep moving rapidly - and spread out the moment the spearhead stalls - you will see it smashed by indirect fire. They are not rival things true about tactical combat. They are alternate things to do, depending on what is in front of you, on how the enemy decided to deploy.

You certainly could call in an adjustment from a TRP or pre-planned concentration. The real benefit of it is that the fire would be more accurate. Calling in a grid square, you would get rounds falling farther from the target, because the FO does not really know exactly where he in on any map, and exactly how far his target is from prominent terrain feature ABC. You still have all of the usual FO problems, misestimating the range from point A to point B, and especially having difficulty telling how far away a shell landed on level ground, with only the left-right location of the plume kicked up by the shell standing out against the background. But the problem of the FO not knowing exactly where he is on the map does go away. In real fire missions, fire on a new target would involve a spotting round and corrections that might add a minute to the adjustment time, if the initial fire wasn't lucky or the FO wasn't very good about where he was, or didn't have a prominent, easily located piece of terrain on his map and in his line of sight. In CM, I see single rounds land a little before the fire mission sometimes, which may be meant to simulate spotting rounds. The time between the spotting round and the rest of the fire mission is usually very short in CM, though, so it tends to blend into the scatter of the first round from each gun, in time and in space. Playing the Americans in CM, I see adjustment times of 2 minutes with 105s and 1 minute with battalion mortars, which is extremely fast, and hardly leaves time for back and forth with spotting rounds. The effect I would advise for CM, is adjustment *to* a TRP (only) should be both more accurate and faster. Adjustment *from* a TRP, to within 100-200 meters, say, should be more accurate but not appreciably faster. One man's opinion...

Mines inside of houses are called booby traps. They were quite common in WW II. A tripwire across a window-frame connected to a grenade, a toe-popper placed under a bit of rubble, etc. Traps or men covering an opening were so common that the German doctrine was to go through windows not the doors, even in villages. And in street fighting inside large cities, they prefered to blow a new hole in the wall or to enter the building on the upper floors - with a ladder or plank or across roofs from another building - because just barging in the doors or even ground-floor windows resulted in extremely high casualties.

Any "quick" fused shell will provide the airburst effect in the woods. The VT does the same thing in the open. On the general comments in the tread, I agree with some of them. U.S. forces are designed for combined arms combat and anyone playing the U.S. that does not get full use out of their artillery is selling his guys short. I personally prefer a mix of 105mm and 81mm to the 107mm, though, because in fact the 107s were much less common/fewer issued. Every battalion could call on assigned 81s and their were enough 105s to support just about every front-line battalion, when up-n-back deployments and higher level artillery assets are taken into account. It feels more realistic to me. The Brits get awesome guns on a portion of their tanks, which properly handled should be a considerable edge. The Germans have all kinds of tricks besides frontal armor impervious to short 75s. SMGs, 2 LMG squad types used split into small teams, fausts, mortars, rockets, 20mm and 88mm FLAK and halftrack supports with this or that added. It remains the case that use of super vehicles is boring and gamey to me. I do not doubt there are plenty of people who enjoy playing with their favorite item. I just am not that sort. I want fights that present me with tactical problems that men were likely to face in 44-45, or the interest just is not there. My prefered solution to this is setting a maximum "rareness factor" for equpiment (as assigned in ASL, and reported in available CM unit databases), like 1.3. There are undoubtedly other ways to handle it.

Mighty fine. A couple of points I noticed, in the writer's obviously fine play. There is always room for noticing new points. Number one, the positioning of the 75mm ATG probably accounts for its relatively rapid loss once it became engaged. It was set up for a wide field of fire, with the result that many enemy tanks could fire back at it. While such a "forward" deployment was obviously sensible for the "deception" force 88 (which would also attrite the enemy armor and tend to make it more cautious), it might have been better to chose a more "keyholed" deployment position for the second gun. For example, farther back into the village there is a stone-wall enclosure of sorts. Dug in behind that wall, the gun might have been able to see out behind the various buildings across its front, masked from a full view of the entire field by the buildings. I don't have the map to fiddle with the LOS tool, to see if such a place would have worked. But it is the general idea that is the point. The location where you had the AT gun would be fine for a Panzerscreck, able to hit any tanks that came close down the road, and to remain hiding until one did. A live AT gun somewhere inside the village might have restricted his armor, and the gun might have managed to outshoot the single tanks that would get LOS to it at one time in such a deployment, better than the entire enemy force. Yes, an open field of fire seems to restrict his armor more, but open views mean short life expectancy, and then no restriction on his armor. Of course, luck would play a role regardless, and eventually his artillery would probably have silenced it whatever yoy did. Second, I question using up the last of the 105mm ammo on further "interdiction" fires on the enemy infantry mass moving up along the southern approach. If you had the ammo for it, that would be fine. But I would have saved one fire-mission's worth of the heavy stuff for later. After the deception forces repositioned, it would have been great to have one 105mm mission to drop on the enemy massing behind the obstacles at the time of his attack, or at the time you choose to pull back into the interior of the village. But those are minor points. Obviously, the whole defense was well conceived and well executed.

I know what your saying, I just think you have it wrong and CM has it nearly right. You've got this idea that the delay is all caused by the battery not knowing where on earth you are, a calculating problem (which it could *sometimes* be, as an added delay), and that therefore adjusting fire from a TRP should be significantly easier than a brand new fire mission. But the artillery battery is laid. It has grid references for every 10 yard square on the continent, and knows "where" it is pointing. The time it takes it to fire a brand new fire mission is the time it takes it to make such adjustments. It is not like the only positions on the earth's surface that it knows the locations of, are the TRPs. The reason adjusting fire *to* a TRP is faster is not merely that the battery has calculated a pair of angles for the fire mission. It has also chalked them on the sides of the guns, so that every E-3 knows exactly what to do if you call in "concentration Bravo", without having to go through the battery chain of command at all. The delay is not caused by physical movement of the barrels, nor by the battery fire control center's calculating time, but by the command time to coordinate the guns and the execution time to prep, fuse, load, and fire the shells. The calculation is taking place at the same time as all of the other preparations. So that you understand what I mean by "the command time", I mean every E-3 on an elevating screw or deflection wheel to rotate the gun, if reacting independently to a call to "drop 100", will turn the wheels in different directions and some of them will get it wrong. They have to be told "deflection 1273, quadrant 312", and they have to call back to their gun chief the number they have dialed to, correctly, after doing so. What the pre-plotted concentration does is cut out the battery chain of command from the process, effectively. It lets every man in the battery execute his firing task in parallel, instead of waiting for his position in a coordinated sequence for the whole battery. Every E-3 wheels to the white chalk line with the big "B" next to it, as plain as his sergeant's nose. No back and forth sing-song, no cross checking.

Realistically, it depends on what happened to the gun. A gun disabled hit that does not penetrate can mean anything from smashing the gunsight to mangling the barrel or the mantle where it reaches and fits to the rest of the tank. An interior, penetrating hit that knocks out the gun could be as simple as a jammed turret or the sight again, or as bad as you'd care to imagine. Tank repair teams are not outfitted with spare barrels from home, for the simple reason that there aren't any spare barrels from home, those being fitted to entire new tanks. But a maintenance shop will cannabilize some "kills" to get others back into operation. A tank will come in a burnt-out wreck, but with an intact gunsight. That will fix another that was broken in some different way. You cannot expect all of damaged tanks to be returned to service. Simple hulls in the hull that hurt crewmen and led to the tank being abandoned, perhaps. With everything else, you are going to lose a dead tank to resurrect its neighbor, so if you get half of them back that is about all you can expect. With longer to work - weeks or a month - and thus more wrecks coming through the shop with widely different things wrong with them, it will end up easier to mix-n-match and get more of them back into to service. But short term, realistically one would expect around half to be recovered. How does it work in CM? I don't know...

The keyes of tactics usually are not found in a formula, but in an adaptation of several mutually contradictory formula to a tactical problem at hand. In other words, everyone has more military maxims than actually apply, and the trick is getting the right one. Because the reality is, everywhere there are trade-offs and countermeasures. I mention this because of an example quoted in the article previewed, the principle of mass. Modern "blitz" or "schwerpunk" tactics make everything out of the principle of mass. In its simplest form, it is the idea of your force fighting 4 battles in succession against portions of the enemy force, at 4:1 odds each time, by manuevering tightly through a spread out enemy. There is just one immediate problem with this. Artillery. In modern terms, applying the principle of mass underneath an MLRS savlo will ruin your whole day. In CM terms, the compact company-level attack through the woods is a brilliant application of the principle of mass (as well as the "covered approach") - until the enemy FO calls in 120mm mortar fire on the company. The firepower of area weapons makes men spread out. The principle of mass allows a compact body to defeat spread out forces in sequence, one after another. Both are entirely true, and not only are they not truly contradictory, they only work at all because of each other. Concentrated enemies are best dealt with, not by counter-concentrated attacks, which will result in great destruction on both sides but most of it on the side of a moving attacker, but instead by fire. Concerntrated "shock" action (moving to the close ranges at which the weapons are most lethal - which can be reasonable far away in the case of armor on the CM scale, by the way) defeats spread out forces. To avoid easy destruction by the area effects of fire, an compact attacking formation needs to be able to keep moving, and moveover needs to be able to spread out again and if necessary to back away, if fire requires it. Knowing when you can afford to concentrate, and when the results to be quickly expected from it are worth the dangers it involves, is the real tactical issue. The WW II era, down to recent times, was an era marked by a peculiar assymmetry in the effectiveness of area fire weapons. Artillery was largely ineffective against heavy armor, while remaining effective against all other types of units. Before the era in question, only immobile fortifications offered protection of a kind from artillery, and in more recent times advances in technology have made the highest-tech artillery again dangerous to even heavy armor. Between the two periods, armor could afford greater concentrations on the battlefield than other units could. Artillery firepower was high enough to force widely spread deployments on all other types. This created great opportunities for concentrated armor to employ the so-called "principle of mass", or to fight the enemy in sequence. And a lot of people noticed it, and decided that it was the be-all of modern manuever. But it only works in the first place because firepower is already there to make people spread out. There are usually two sides of every tactical maxim, so if you apply them mechanically without understanding why they work, you can easily hurt your men quite badly. There aren't any fixed rules for when and how much you go with this vs. that side of such trade-offs. It is a matter of relating the choice to the enemy and the ground, etc. You get a feel for such things, see opportunities to use now one of them, now another. For what it is worth...

When you say "you can't adjust it until it has been firing for 60 seconds", I simply do not find this to be true. If you call in an adjustment "right when" the artillery is about to arrive, you will bump the time back 30 seconds or so, but get the adjustment, sometimes after an early spotting round, or 1-2 rounds per gun it is true. As for the "completely arbitrary" time to adjust fire, it seems to me this is based on an exclusive focus on the FO talking into the radio. The battery is where the real delay is occuring. In this thread, one poster seems to have the idea that once they are told, the artillery can easily adjust in 12 seconds or something. In may interest you to know that even today, an artillery battery trains to be able to put rounds on target from the time of the call in a two minute time limit. If already "laid", ready, and bearing near the target that is not too bad for reasonably trained troops, and some can do it faster. But you should understand what is occuring, pell-mell, in that period of time. The nature of the fire mission is being transmitted to every gun in the battery (4-6 of them), where loaders are acknowledging getting the order right, are screwing the appropriate fuses with the appropriate settings into the shell, which settings may need to be set with a sort of screwdriver and which fuses need to be locked in place, are "cutting" the powder to the right sized charge for the range, and loading that into the back of the unscrewed artillery round (for semi-fixed ammo like the U.S. 105mm anyway), or ready to go in behind the round. The gun barrel is being adjusted onto the target, except it also has to be near horizontal for loading so often the elevation goes in last. The sight is prepared for that. The breech is opened, the round shoved into the tube and rammed forward into the barrel (with powder behind it on larger, seperate-loading pieces), the block is closed and locked, a priming mechanism is moved into place and charged with a primer round, the barrel is elevated to the proper range, then the gun crew chief calls it "ready" to the battery commander, who may want the guns to fire at the same time to avoid the targets taking cover, and at the signal all the guns are fired. Additional rounds for the remainder of the mission (as in "battery, fire mission, 3 rounds HE, fuse quick...") are being prepared to follow into the tube, which may need to be depressed and re-elevated or not between each round, not to mention swabbed between in the case of the larger pieces to avoid premature ignition of powder on the next shot by embers remaining from the previous. "Hey, they should be able to do that in 12 seconds" is entirely unrealistic. The battery is not a cardboard counter nor a bitmap, and its members are humping around 100 lb shells, bags of explosive, detonators, running hydraulics and readjusting the gun's aim after each recoil, shouting orders at each other and running this or that here or there in a deafening din - not playing Nintendo. 12 seconds is more like the flight time of the shells themselves from the time they leave the tube until they finally arrive at the target. As for use of TRPs in adjustments, adjusting *to* a TRP, whether firing before or not, should be distinctly faster than other shoots, and very small adjustments in aim point can also be done faster than a new fire mission. But complex adjustments from a previous or reference point of aim are only marginally faster than an ordinary original fire mission. About the only time they save is the time spent moving the tube to point that way, which is a tiny portion of the actual time the battery spends to ready and fire a set of rounds. As for the 20m area around the TRP, my understanding is that just is the TRP, its size essentially. It is not a point but a small patch of ground, which incidentally is about the smallest thing a battery 3-10 miles away could aim at anyway. In my opinion, the least realistic thing about fire missions in CM is the great flexibility it allows the FO to adjust a fire mission after it has been called but before it has arrived. In real life, this is distinctly harder to do. CM puts only a modest time penalty on it, which I consider quite generous, and allows automatic and instant cut-off of a fire mission in process, which a real-world FO can only dream about having in practice. But these added bits of flexibility are close enough and improve playability, so I don't really mind them.

It can make sense to move mounted as you have been doing over ground you know is clear of the enemy or of his fire. But once you think contact is likely, it is best to send small infantry units ahead of your armor/ Infantry are "eyes and ears". What you haven't seen can most definitely hurt you. Yes, they can be pinned down pretty easily, but only by disclosing a target your tanks can then hit, and you wil have more. Also, when going in to heavily occupied enemy areas, leading with tanks invites high losses to infantry anti-tank weapons, especially if you have the Allies facing German fausts at close range. Usually it is better to suppress the enemy infantry with fire or arty and then send in the infantry first, with the tanks supporting by fire. Broken infantry is very vunerable to infantry in close combat, and one shooter left pinning a squad is much more acceptable than one faust left torching a tank. The tank's main job it not to carry infantry theough MG fire, but to kill the enemy armor without dying themselves, and then to support by fire without getting within range of the infantry anti-tank weapons. A tank that is left alive at 200+ yards with functioning armament, when the enemy armor has been beaten, is practically invunerable and can dominate all the more open areas of the whole battlefield. More it better of course. But the end-state to aim for with tanks is just that - yours alive and supporting, his dead.

I have a habit usually thought indelicate of blurting out unstated minor premises. Chalk it up to the scholastic philosopher in me. I'm even worse at cocktail parties. I will point out that no one was mentioned in my quip, which was a purely anonymous last straw-man standing after my previous tendentious arguments. And knocking the stuffing out of it was fun. As for the statement that "no one here is calling for its inclusion", on the contrary. You may not be, fine. As for the "only help Amis" quip, that is rather silly, what with nothing on earth to base it on. Then there is the point that you meant direct fire. Fine, that is what you meant. If you read what I've written, you will find me arguing against the proposition that use of 88s either for "fused ambush airbursts at crossroads" or "indirect fire" are both common and ordinary and typical, which notion is being defended on the thread, in case you hadn't noticed. Then you comment that if the fire is direct, the guns delivering it might be more available. This is halfway plausible enough in some situations - like, the reason the 88s are really there is to stop an armored column, which just hasn't arrived yet. But my objections still apply in that case. Why warn the armor not to proceed into the ambush by giving away the 88s presence, when a MG would suffice to scatter the infantry? And if they aren't waiting to ambush an armored column, it simply pushes the same objection back a step. Why are the defenders deploying an 88 FLAK battery to defend this crossroads from infantry, instead of doing something more useful and urgent that only 88s can go do, while letting a couple of infantry guns do the job? "The infantry guns might not be available". Right, and the 88s are, just by coincidence. Incidentally, the Germans built and deployed more than 17 million Teller mines in WW II. Think they could spare 10 for your crossroads? Compared to a battery of 88s? Then there is the statement that the reason to do it is the greater effectiveness of an airburst. Unstated minor number one - against infantry in the open. Unstated minor number two - for the same weight of shell. A 150mm infantry gun will rock the world of a squad of infantry in the open meandering through a boresighted crossroads. Its shell weighs about 100 pounds. The Germans had enough to issue them every infantry regiment, although often they were then mounted on some sort of chassis to serve as an assault gun. Even if it detonates "point". In CM terms, it has a 200 blast, vs. 51 for an 88 HE. Or you could mine and mortar and machinegun the place, obviously. It is not like infantry in the open is the hardest target to manage to somehow mess up. Let alone at a known ambush location. Who cares whether they buy the farm from a big slow howitzer shell or a fast small anti-aircraft shell? Or a teller mine, or a machinegun bullet? Then there was the statement that the 88s might be less susceptible to counterbattery fire. Wait, they were firing direct. That means they are in LOS, perfect target for a fire mission. Whereas if you sat 3 81mm mortars behind a ridge somewhere - or a 120mm Mortar FO - then a sneaky HQ could sight for them without firing a shot, and nobody would even know where the rounds came from (except "straight up"). I'd also like to understand an explanation for the stellar effectiveness of counterbattery fire on 9 teller mines after the ambush has already been sprung, and the unspeakable losses the Germans would incur thereby, that could be avoided if a battery of 88mm FLAK are divert to your sector, to stop the urgent threat from a platoon of American infantry walking down the middle of a road. At the risk of being as annoying as a scholastic, I state again the obvious minor - the reason people think German 88s "should" be able to deliver airbursts on American infantry, is because U.S. artillery can deliver airbursts on German infantry, and it is unfair, flat unfair, or at least a denial of potential revenge, not to be able to do it too. Well, mine goes to 11. The reason this is a silly idea is that 88 FLAK guns had better things to do, in the sense of more important tasks they were good at that most weapons in the German arsenal were not nearly as good at. The U.S. artillery having the ability is marginally improving its effectiveness in its doctrinal, proper role, which it does better than anything else, and without diverting from anything else, which is why it does it regularly. Even then, it makes very little difference. How many German squads have you seen get caught in the open by U.S. 105mm arty, without airbursts, and get away whole because whew, at least the ~15-20 firecrackers that just went off all around me, out here in the open in overlapping casualty zones from a quarter of them, weren't airbursts? Why do I think somebody nevertheless once went to the trouble to do it? As an ad hoc thing, it makes perfect sense. The gun is in the wrong place. It is on some other mission - perhaps it was supposed to block the road from tanks that did not show. Perhaps it is a relatively hasty defense, and the outpost line only bought the MRL 30 minutes to set up, and no time to lay mines. Perhaps the battalion mortars just expended their last rounds on a different part of the fight 500 yards wwest. It is not the right weapon, it is not the economical weapon, after helping win this local fight (hopefully), the 88 will leave to do something more important. But here it is, and here they come, and somebody thinks of a trap, and they arrange their little present. Perfectly plausible. Without making it common, regular, etc, to use 88s for indirect fire.

You would convince me a lot more with a German artillerists field-training pamphlet about how to fuse HE shells for ground level airbursts and to fire said airbursts indirectly and on-call via an ad hoc FO (since AA battalions did not have any), than with any number of stories about troops who said "and then the shells burst right over my head - it was an ambush - they had us zero'd with 88s and it was murder..." You would also convince me a lot more of the practice being common, as opposed to an occasional stop-gap measure, if you can explain to me what the supposed bleeding point is. The number of German weapons that can put a shell on a crossroads to nuke troops in the open is pretty freaking large. The number of things a live 88 can do that every gun the German arsenal can't do as well, is also pretty freaking large. But this ain't one of them. Why on earth waste useful 88s firing indirect fire at infantry in the open at an ambush crossroads, instead using them to nuke tanks from 4 miles or shoot bombers out of the air - while parking a 150mm infantry gun a mile away with a line of sight, or a battery of 120mm mortars 2 miles away behind a ridge, or for the mission assignment just putting 10 teller mines in the dang crossroads and the sticking an MG 42 on a set-n-locked tripod, on the place? As I have said, I think with a fair amount of extra work, they could probably do it, and that sometime or other, somebody probably did. But nobody has given the slightest military reason to think it was common or specially useful or even sensible in any way. Do people think the number of shells you can throw somewhere indirect is limited by the tubes you've got, so you aren't getting enough use out of your guns if you don't fire everyone of them in your arsenal in every way it can be fired, on every occasion when it might be fired? If so, I can quickly disabuse you of the notion. The German army had not lack of artillery pieces - of a dozen types - capable of putting a shell at a crossroads, if some local commander knew the time he'd want it. They did have shortages of shells, so they hardly had every tube firing whenever it could. Automatically, most were silent most of the time, because otherwise 3 days of firing and there wouldn't be a shell left in German occupied Europe. The rate determining step, as chemists put it, on the delivery of artillery shells, was how fast they were being made, not tubes to send them through. Generic tubes, they had. On the other hand, they did have shortages of high-powered, long-range anti-tank guns, and most front line commanders would sell their mother to get one. So just exactly how is it a brilliant tactical stroke worthy of constant duplication, to reduce an 88 FLAK to a glorified and dandified 105mm howitzer, if even that? "But I bought one with my points, and I want to use it every turn". G. Ga-ga. Gam, gam, gam. Gam-ey!

Back to the shop, fix the gun (probably quite easy with a spare part), hunt tanks tomorrow. To the bloody infantry - sorry boys. I tried, but a blasted mortar smashed my gunsight.

When tac air breaks out its strafing and bombing missions, it is seperating them from their air superiority/fighter sweep, bomber escort, and V-1 interception missions, and the like. Most of the planes in the command were not dedicated ground attack aircraft at all, and the ground attack aircraft were all capable of multiple missions. The target mix of 2000 trucks and 200 trains most certainly does mean that most of the bombing and strafing missions were interdiction. Interdiction does not mean "trying to blow up a bridge", as I suppose it might to some contemporary air tasker. It means destroying anything moving on the lines of communication of the enemy forces. The supplies of the forces at the front are the target, and the idea is to prevent their arrival and destroy their means of delivery. That is "interdiction". As for the pre-arranged targets, for a target to be pre-arranged it has to sit still, and most CAS targets do not fall into that category. Bridges sit still, and railroad marshalling yards, and culverts or railroad cuts. V-1 launch sites too. All of which tac air was going after. If you "pre-arrange" to blast a Panther platoon or attacking infantry company, they are miles away under a camo net or in foxholes when you arrive bright and early at 10 o'clock the following day. The closest thing to a CAS mission that might be "pre-arranged" would be so kind of counterbattery work, but even that is unlikely because batteries moved. It would be much more likely to actually catch them as a target of opportunity called in by an L-5 spotting plane while they were firing. When I spoke of the number of "true CAS missions", I meant the number of fighter bombers delivering real CAS to forces in contact on an average day. Of course squadrons flew missions. They also broke up to go after targets, but WW II fighter aircraft always operated in at least pairs (to protect each other in the air if it became necessary), hence my estimate about the number of pairs of FBs that might be expected to support a ground unit of a given size.

It "makes sense" because historically, there were 4 allied AFVs for every 1 German one. And making that only 3:2 is already balancing to favor the Germans and make for a more balanced game. And the point limits will tend to push the German player to explore the rest of the possible OOBs, which are much more like the real battles, instead of (yawn) all the Panthers money can buy. Hetzers are less than 100 points with normal crews. They penetrate any common Allied vehicle from the front at range. Their front armor is sloped enough that they can bounce most Allied shells at medium range, especially hull down. They are small targets to boot. And the Germans were turning out them, and their cousins the StuGs and the Jadgpanzer IVs, like gangbusters over the last year of the war, compared to the number of Panthers they were making. Someone said the German artillery is a joke. The mortars are not a joke, either the 81mm or the 120mm. And who uses the 150mm rockets? Sure they are inaccurate, which means you have to use them differently than you use point-blasted arty. But they are also dirt cheap, because the launchers were dirt cheap to make, being not much more than a set of hollow tubes. Those are the indirect fire support means the Germans could actually afford. And historically, the Germans used lots of towed guns and ad hoc armed HT versions of the same weapons. Granted the towed ones are less useful in meeting engagements than on the defense, but there are enourmous bargains there. Many know about the usefulness of the 20mm FLAK, yet I constantly here the refrain of outrage against the uber M-8 on this board. Where are your rapid fire pop-guns to shred them, if they bother you so much? Said pop guns are dirt cheap after all. And the German infantry, as it is available to the QB buyer as opposed to in scenarios, is incredible in the literal sense of the word. No quality problems with bottom of the barrel manpower here. Instead, all the automatic weapons you want, cheap. In the real war, German machine pistols and Panzerfausts, German mortars used in clever ways, all sorts of light cannons, dug in or on halftracks, and German assualt guns firing from ambush, were the tactical problems the allies actually faced. Using all of those weapons well and coordinating their use, or overcoming them, is at least half the point. Instead we get (yawn) endless dissertations on the slope of a Panther's front armor and (yawn) the penetrating powers of the US 76.2mm AP (yawn) against that exact item (zzz)... With occasional anecdotal ravings against the uber M-8 (hmm? Oh, yeah. Moving shooters should not hit much, yeah. Heard it the fifth time, thanks. Right, 37mm anti-tank guns are small. I got that. The Germans conquered Europe in Pz IIIs with 37mm and short 50mm guns, did you know that? Sure, who cares, that was before the Amis...)

The Germans built and fielded a little less than 50,000 tanks and tank destroyers in WW II. The US built around 85,000. The Russians built 103,000. The Brits built a lesser number, but in the tens of thousands certainly. The Germans were therefore being outbuilt by 4 to 1. And the Germans were not half as obsessed with heavy tanks and TDs as CM players are. The majority of the AFVs they were building in the last year, year and a half of the war, were StuG IIIs, Panzer IVs, the Panzer IV chassis Jadgpanzers, and Hetzers. They never took the Mark IV out of production because they knew there was no way they could make do numerically with the output of only the heavier types, and they could not afford the cost in vehicles built for downtime to retool factories to switch. The TDs also were nearly twice as easy to build as the heavy tanks. The only heavier model they were committed to building in quantity was the Panther, which they issued and used as a medium tank. It was a great tank, obviously, and not a monster of giantism by any means. The total number of Tiger Is produced in the whole war was perhaps 5% of German AFV production. The still heavier and rarer types where made in numbers with 3 digits, meaning 1-2% of the overall production effort. As for the tanks they were facing on the eastern front, it is a little appreciated fact that the Germans faced heavier enemy tanks on essentially all fronts for the first 3 1/2 years of the war, about which coincided, incidentally, with the time they were winning. Facing the minor European powers - Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece - sure the Germans outclassed what they were facing in weight of metal terms. But not so against the French, British, or Russians in the early years of the war. The Germans fought most of their victories using the humble Pz Mark III, which started out with a 37mm gun (like the one on the U.S. Stuart or M-8) and escalated as the war progressed to a short-barreled then a long-barrel 50mm. It could not hold a 75mm, which was the reason for the Pz IV. Pz IVs had been around for a while, but mounting short barreled, low velocity howitzers and used like the later Sherman 105s or British CS tanks. The armor on the Mk III was thinner than that one the Mk IV, although the overall protection of the two types was comparable. Against these dinky tanks, the French fielded heavily gunned monsters twice their weight mounting a 75 howitzer *and* a 47mm antitank gun, plus other types with the 47s - the Brits fielded Matildas with 40mm (2-lber) guns comparable to the German ones but with much heavier armor that was proof against the main German guns from the front, and the Russians fielded T-34s and KV-1s that were armored much better, approaching a Tiger Is armor in the case of the heaviest KV series tanks, and mounting 76mm high velocity guns like those later sported by the Marder, Panzer IV, or U.S. Sherman 76s - in 1941. The Germans defeated all of the above because they had a superior armor doctrine, and placed proper emphasis on combined arms, communications and mobility, alertness and manuever. The tanks worked with close infantry support while the Allied ones tended to run off alone. The Germans made a high art out of leading Allied tanks chasing them into ambush positions of concentrated German towed AT guns (the "PaK front"). The accompanied all their armored columns with regular artillery and provided everyone with radios to call in fire support and communicated information with each other rapidly. And they stood up, unbuttoned, in their turrets, so they could see what the heck was going on, while Allied tankers tended to button at the first sign of trouble (a tendency greatly furthered by the Germans having infantry around the tanks while the Allies often had none). Compared to the situation in 1944 vs. the Americans, the German forces of 1939-1942 looked a lot more like the American forces. They had less front armor, smaller tank guns, but tons of support and combined arms and usually decent numbers, attained by smart operational handling that put high portions of their tank force up against smaller portions of the enemy's, at a time. The Germans also had control of the air and the scouting and road movement advantages that went with it. The Germans fought against T-34s by up-gunning the Pz IV with a long 75 that could penetrate it - usually - while also being penetrable in turn. The developed the Panther to be able to beat T-34s, but the Russians were not idle and basically matched it with the T-34/85. The Panther's better optics gave it better range, but otherwise there is little to choose between the two, purely as pieces of equipment and discounting how well they were handled. The Germans made all sorts of experiments with heavier armor to try to get an edge on the Russians, knowing by 1943 that the Russians were outproducing them in tanks alone, leave aside the Americans. The idea was to get something to the front that would do the work of 2-3 by being locally invunerable. But the Russians were basically level with them or ahead, in pure equipment terms, for almost the entire war - only brief windows between introduction of one model and its counter excepted. By the end of the war the Germans had the King Tiger design and made a few hundred, while the Russians were on the 3rd upgrade of the Stalin series, which was far and away the best all-around heavy tank of the war, and which they were turning out in thousands, not hundreds. But the Russians mostly relied on a fleet of T-34s as easier to make and faster operationally than the monster tanks, just as the Germans made far more Panthers than heavyweight TDs and King Tigers. While the quality of tanks deployed certainly mattered, it did not outweigh a difference in sound doctrine, combined arms teamwork, and crew and command skill. As the war progressed those things became more even between the countries, too, as people learned the early-war German tactics and adapted their own versions. None of the fleeting material advantages the Germans had in the east could replaced the lost one-sided edge of being the only army to start the war with a sound combined-arms doctrine on the use of armor. Once everyone knew the trick, it was mostly numbers, which of course were strongly against the Germans. The Germans tried to tell themselves that quality would defeat quantity, but as Zukhov put it, "quantity has a quality all its own". The American army perspective, as one sees in the official histories, is that they (the American officers, especially in armor but across the board) had learned in a German school but were applying the same successful German doctrines of the 1939-1942 period, against the Germans themselves. U.S. force compositions emphasized combined arms, mobility, communications, coordination, air superiority, etc. Which the American officers had identified (correctly, in my opinion) as the real cause of the early successes of the Germans, which the Americans (again correctly IMO) did not see as in any way due to some alleged superiority of the tanks or other armored equipment itself, but instead lay in how it was organized, coordinated, and used. One man's opinions...

AIs tend to orient themselves by objectives. Instead of one large objective only, try putting some minor flags along prefered, sensible routes to the objective. I realize your victory conditions may hinge on the fight for one place, but if you choose the other locations by their ability to influence the fight for, or the safety of control over, the main objective, you may get the same overall outcome. And the AI may move more sensibly if it sees a gain from going to locations you know are sensible ones, on its way to the objective.

On the radar direction of German FLAK, that is a story of measure and countermeasure actually. The Brits invented chaff during WW II to fool the radar sets on those 88s. Pathfinder planes (Mosquitos usually in the RAF) flew ahead of the bombers and dropped their loads of tinfoil, cut to the wavelength of the German radar. The bombers came soon after, but at a somewhat higher altitude, and the chaff was also fluttering downward in the meantime. The result was the German radar directed FLAK was fooled into firing too low, below the bombers. But the Germans rapidly figured out what was going on, and disabled their radar directors. They then had to use some other means of estimating the altitude of the attacking formation. After a number of ad hoc means (adding this, eyeballing that, etc) they finally hit upon one that really worked. A fighter would pull alongside the formation, look at the alimeter, and radio the answer down to the gun crews! And then bug out of Dodge, obviously - LOL. Then the FLAK crews firing timed, without benefit of radar. As for the difficulties of setting up the airburst, I never suggested that they could do it on the fly, real time, in a firefight. Far from it. I explicitly stated that while it seems possible, it could only be done in an ambush situation, in which they had time to pre-sight and register the target exactly, with a trial shell or two probably needed as well. I think they could certainly have pulled it off with that sort of time to prep. Think about it this way. If the engineers have time to plant a buried minefield and strong barbed wire obstacles, the infantry have time to build sandbag and log-top bunkers, and the artillery has time to plot exact registrations, then an 88 FLAK could arrange a timed airburst at a crossroads. And moving the gun a bit to prep an ambush would happen anyway, to find the best spot. Would they bother to? There I am a little more skeptical. I bet somewhere, somebody probably did so. But I sincerely doubt it was a regular practice, or deserves inclusion in CM. Just buy a module of 105mm arty FO and put a TRP on the crossroads, and the result will be quite close enough. More likely, too. As for the stories about how common it was for the Germans to shell the Americans with "88s", I think that probably stems from the infantryman's perspective that everything was an 88. Any flat-trajectory gun firing HE, above an infantry howitzer anyway, is going to give the supersonic "whizbang" effect of the shell arriving before the "report". The Germans called the Russian 76mm duel purpose field artillery pieces "whizbangs" for that same reason. Perhaps they too were 88s? Another fellow was talking about the settings he saw on a fuse, topping out at 130, and wondered if that meant 13 km. For an AA gun, I doubt it - that is 42,000 feet up, much higher than the planes flew. It is more likely the figure is the time in tenths of seconds, 13 seconds the longest setting. Then the .5 lines he saw would mean 1/20th of a second settings, which as my previous calculations showed, would be about what you would need to put a shell within 100 feet of altitude when firing just about straight up. 13 seconds, incidentally, for the 88 muzzle velocity gives a height of ~27000 feet with that time setting, probably minus a bit for air resistence, perhaps to 25000 feet. About right for the heights they might shoot - the bombers generally came in between 18000 and 24000 feet (heavies at high altitude - the mediums dropped from more like 10000 to 12000 feet). In sum, I think they could technically do it with the means available. At some time, somebody probably did do it, as a one-off thing, and created an anecdote about it that was true enough. But the supposed regular practice of it strikes me as the familiar phenomenon of exaggeration of the enemy's means.

Problem one is the terminology. Some writers mistakenly refer to everything tac air does as close air support, probably because they mentally drop the "close" and include all of the effects of air support. The proper distinction is between the mission of interdiction and the mission of close air support. In layman's terms, the first of those means the fighter-bombers go hunting along the roads behind the enemy lines and shoot up anything they spot. The latter means looking for targets within weapons range, "in contact", of friendly forces, on call or by smoke grenade or air-panel signal, etc. It appears the Brits called the interdiction mission "armed recce". Of the totals mentioned, the 20000 sorties by tac air over Normandy certainly do *not* count as all CAS. Most of those are interdiction missions. The 15% of the British sorties listed as in response to improptu requests is more like the CAS total. If the U.S. was flying those at the same rate, it might mean 3000 sorties of CAS in the Normandy fighting. If the U.S. was flying less interdiction and more CAS, 6000 maybe, at the outside. The conclusion is that true CAS missions were conducted at a rate of 50-100 a day along the Normandy frontage. That works out to one or two pairs of fighter-bombers per division per day, or a perhaps a 25-50% chance of a battalion in the front line receiving CAS sometime in a day's fighting (in doctrinal deployments anyway). Higher on clear days, to be sure - the Normandy fighting occurred in a period with considerable overcast. A company's chances of getting a Jabo's support on the front line, an a clear day in Normandy, in a particular hour of combat? 10% at best. By contrast, it could count on support from the plentiful Allied artillery. But if the conclusion from that is that tac air didn't do much, that would be quite wrong. Its contribution was just made via the interdiction mission, not the CAS one. Area fire by artillery behind the front was quite ineffective. Fire on targets the engaged forces could see was comparatively easy for the artillery. But the planes could see their targets on the rear area roads, when no FOs or gunners could. It is not surprising that is where they made a serious difference. And it is a serious difference. The figures for locomotives and rail cars amount to 4 trains a day blown up, which might mean 10-15% of all the supplies the Germans were getting. And the cumulative total of more than 2000 vehicles is even more important. You may not realize it, but that figure could easily amount to half the transport of the German force in Normandy, and the impact of the lose of so much of its transport, on the ability of the German force to manuever or to supply itself in place, let alone to supply itself while trying to move after the breakout, would be enourmous. The effect of tac air success in interdiction would be felt in vehicles lost to mechanical failure for want of parts, attacks prevented by lack of fuel, inability to move forces rapidly over roads to meet an attack, etc. Not big booms on the tactical battlefields of CM scale fights. The CAS 5-10% presence could be there, certainly. It just was not anything like the importance at the front line, in the usual scheme of things, of the 105mm tube artillery (or 25-lbers) and the 81mm (or 3 inch) battalion mortars.

There may be a misunderstanding here. The leveling bubbles are not meant to find the direction of the ground, but to ensure that the barrel and the sight are pointed in the same direction. The sight moves and points independently. You can point the periscope of the sight to some place 45 degrees off the direction of the barrel, and 20 degrees up in the air, if you want. If you put the crosshairs of the sight on that location, it will certainly not make the round hang a left and pull into a climb upon leaving the tube. You have to point the barrel at the target. The sight is a means of finding the angles you should point it - the directions. You point the sight at the target - and then you align the barrel with the sight. The last of those is all the leveling bubbles do. If both barrel and sight are at some additional angle to the ground, it is the same angle, and that is all that matters. You don't care about the absolute angle of the barrel to the ground, only the relative one between barrel and sight. The point about a slight effect of "cant" may be what the original poster in the thread meant. That barrel of the gun is a heavy object held in place by a carriage of some sort, attaching it to the gun. In different orientations to the ground (on different slopes), it will "sit" slightly differently on its holding base, bend a little, or whatever. This will be a quite small amount, much much less than the angle of the ground obviously. On long range shots it might matter, more than I know. The point is to avoid confusion about any large effect of a simple slope on the mechanisms of the sight (as opposed to the barrel or carriage). It won't make any difference. Part of the confusion may stem from much more modern systems used today, in which the barrel is moved automatically - it is said to be "slaved" to the sight - so that all you have to do to point the barrel is put the sight crosshairs on the target, with the barrel itself moving to point at whatever you point the sight at. In the artillery, it still works the old way. One reason there has not been a change there is the sight is left on the target or firing directions - which is often a highly elevated angle, 30-45 degrees - while the barrel has to be depressed to more like horizontal (a smaller angle anyway) to be loaded. Then the barrel is put back in line with the sight again to be fired. The older system also allows the gunner to search for and find targets long before a slow turret has moved over to train on the new target direction. Modern powered turrets are so fast the "slaved" system is deemed superior. With the older ones, the slow turret is being cranked (or moved by the hydraulic) toward the direction of the sight, to be sure, but it is not aligned with it yet, when the target is first "acquired" and the crosshairs put on it. To modern tankers the important point is simple to understand, the sight and the barrel directions are entirely independent, and to use the sight to align the gun the barrel and sight directions must be realigned to a zero angle between them. Which is what the two levels do. (Actually, they are realigned to whatever angle was set between the sight and gun when the weapon was boresighted, which is supposed to be zero degrees but might contain a small error term if done wrong, or get slightly off "true" after many shots or lots of bumpy driving. But that is a quibble).

A bazooka from the flank at about 100 meters. Your last tank from the flank at reasonable range (500 meters is fine). From the front, nothing you've got it going to do it (it takes a 90mm on a Jackson tank destroyer, or a British 17-lber AT gun on a Firefly or tank destroyer, from the front). The way you are suppose to fight them is to get a pair of tanks, so that at least one of them can shoot from the side. With only one, it is obviously easier for him to face your last remaining gun. Or to run it down from the front, even if you try to hide. You might manage to use a bazooka as your "second gun", but you also may have to lure him in close for it to work. (And protected from any accompanying infantry of his). Not easy. I suppose your last tank might be "bait", but anything that depends on your enemy making a mistake is obviously pretty desperate. In the short term, you want to get your tank into dead ground where it can't be spotted, if it isn't already. And your zook teams farther forward than the tank, preferably on the back side (nearest you) of woods, buildings, or crestlines (reverse slope I mean). Get other infantry teams in places where they can see his Panther if possible, and try to keep track of it. Then you watch for a chance to hit it from the side with your remaining tank, and keep the zook teams more or less between the two tanks so he can't run down your tank front-to-front without giving them a flank shot. After that, we has to make a mistake, but you ought to be able to stalemate the situation. Your infantry up front will not like getting shot at very much, but then they never do and always get shot at anyway, so...