jasoncawley@ameritech.net

2 then 3. None of the others is worth trying to hit with arty. Arty is an infantry killer, and you want to use it on multiple targets. It will also do guns, but smart players seperate their guns from other units enough so that a barrage on the gun doesn't hit other people much. Sometimes there will be another target there. Just spending 1/2 a module to suppress a single gun usually isn't worth it. If it KOs an 88 and saves a tank, then yeah sure, it is worth it. But half a 105 module on an infantry gun or light FLAK, is usually not a winning bargain. As for buildings, arty is not very effective against troops in buildings, unless it is very high caliber shells (150mm an up). And you better know somebody is there. Just shooting at empty buildings, you *can* afford with tanks and other such direct-fire HE, but *cannot* afford with the indirect fire weapons. You use them up too fast, and too many of the shells fall between the buildings and do next to nothing. The tanks are still effective with a smaller HE load left, and they will hit the buildings with every shot, so they are OK for anti-building "prep fire". But not the off-map guns, that is a waste. The FO, hit with a machinegun or something. It is overkill to go after a 2-man team with a whole battery of guns. If it is the only thing you have that can see him, and he is calling down heavier fire (like your 81s with a short mission, would stop his 105s or 155s from firing), then sure, that could make sense. But an HMG is liable to do the same thing faster, if you have one handy.

There is no evidence that 503s IIs ever saw combat in Normandy. "In July" is somewhat misleading, since it was the very end of July that the KTs were authorised to them, and they probably hadn't reached the front - if they ever did. Late August in the Falaise fighting there might have been one company of the things roaming about. But no Allied unit ever reported encountering any. In the Bulge, the Germans had 150 of the things start to finish, and they were definitely in combat. Terence asked a fine question, about how they were actually dealt with. Not by armored Banzai charges. 1/3rd of all the Tiger IIs in the Bulge fighting fought with Peiper and were knocked out with his force. Only a few of those were KO'ed in combat, at a couple of fights. In one fight, some U.S. infantry got 4 76mm AT guns on a height looking down into a town where a platoon of these beasties were, and knocked them out. In CM, the 76mm AP will take them out from any angle but the front, as long as the range is short. 1 km mebe, 500 yards definitely. A 76mm "T" round can go through the turret front at ranges under 500 yards. The front hull, they can't deal with the angle rather than the thickness, which means they will only go through if shooting downward. I don't know if these AT guns were firing "T" ammo, or just got side shots because they were opening up from ambush. Others may or may not have been among the ~5-10 tanks Peiper lost to air attack. At times 60 P-47s would go after just a piece of his column, but most of the time the weather was too bad for this to help much. And when air showed up, the Germans would generally pull back, hide the tanks, and then come back at night. Another fight Peiper's Tigers were in saw them attacking a U.S. held town, along with Panthers and Pz IVs. The Germans sent infantry first, but it was pinned in some open fields outside the town (not too wide, but like a strip around it) by MG and infantry fire. So they sent up the tanks. Peiper had ~100, he wasn't going to run out. The defenders there had 2 90mm AA guns, 8 76mm AT guns, and 3 57mm AT guns. During the battle 10 Shermans showed up to help. There was also infantry, most of a battalion. The Germans lost 6 heavy tanks charging them into the town. The 90mms got a couple more beyond the town. In return, they overran the 76mms and cut up 2 companies of infantry pretty bad, and took the place. The defending commander said the problem was "we didn't have as many AT guns as they had tanks". They also didn't have artillery support, because of where various guns were. The U.S. didn't lose any of the Shermans; they stayed behind the infantry. They fired off a lot of their ammo covering them, but avoided any close engagement. The 90mms taking out a couple of tanks beyond the town, blocked the road and ended the pursuit. In another place where the U.S. did have arty, the pattern went more like the way the U.S. wanted it to. The Germans came in with tanks and infantry together. The 105mms went to work and just plastered the German infantry, stripping them off of the tanks. When a few tanks pressed on anyway into the U.S. held town, there were ATGs and 90mm sighted down some of the lanes, and SP tank destroyers and bazooka teams hunting them through the streets. A few of the lead tanks came in and died, and the rest withdrew. To give you an idea of how impossible German infantry support was when this combo was working, one battalion supporting that fight fired 3000 rounds 105mm in the day's battle. The reason this last mentioned fight was important, was its location. It was in a town Peiper had already passed through, and cut the road behind him. That fight described, was holding off an attempt to reopen it. Peiper didn't have all his tanks for that, just the ones he could spare at the rear of his column. They blew up the bridges in front, and then they snaked in the infantry battalions behind to do the number just described. Then it was a matter of time. A Tiger II gets lousy gas milage, about 2 gallons to the mile "highway". Within a day or two, Peiper couldn't move his tanks. It was still a powerful cornered force, though. The U.S. found that out in several attacks meant to draw the "net" around him tighter. Basically, the terrain was tight. The Germans didn't set up where there were fields of fire like the U.S. did. They set up to block the roads, at their bends or where they climbed out of a gully. Hull down with only the front armor facing, they could kill any U.S. tank sent after them. The U.S. tanks couldn't get off the roads to maneuver. The terrain was too steep and heavily wooded. So when the U.S. did have artillery, and the terrain was defensible, what arose was a kind of defense dominance. When the U.S. was attacking, the German heavy tanks could strip the tank support off of the attacking U.S. infantry. Then the U.S. infantry couldn't easily push on, or it got shot up by tanks and infantry both. When the Germans were attacking, the U.S. artillery would strip the German infantry off of the tanks. Without the infantry, the tanks could be killed with flank shots if they kept advancing, in the tight cover. Unless there were a boatload of them, and they took some losses even then. Incidentally, I don't recommend Stuarts to charge KTs. Even Sherman 75s have serious trouble taking out KTs from the side at point blank. What you want to kill KTs, is 76mm, 90mm, or 17-lb guns *and* a flank shot. Bazookas can also do it, again with a flank shot - but they aren't anywhere near as likely to KO them as the better AT guns. As for the 37mm, I have seen them (in tests) get 1 kill of a KT (broadside hull lucky and after numerous bounces), and a few immobilization shots. The 37mm is not rated to penetrate the beastie anywhere, even with 90% armor quality taken into account. Almost every shot will bounce. The right vehicle to kill KTs with flanking charges is not the Stuart but the M18 Hellcat. Its 76mm can punch the holes. T rounds at close range will even go through the turret front, under 500 yards as most CM shots are. M18s only cost 110 as regulars, vs. 95 for a Stuart, so buying the Stuarts is kinda stupid, if winning is the idea. Another fellow asked how common the Stuarts were. Very, but their use for combat wasn't the same in all units. The standard tank formations had a company of 17 Stuarts for each battalion, enough to have a 5-Stuart platoon scout for each tank company if that was desired. In the 2nd and 3rd armored divisions there were even more of the critters, with 2 full battalions of them (each 3 companies) to 4 medium tank (Sherman) battalions (@3 companies). In addition, the cavalry had 1 company of 17 tanks in the battalion. But all these Stuarts were not always used for heavy combat. Some units used them that way, mixed right into the columns with the mediums, to scout for them tactically. But others used them for all sorts of other kinds of lighter duty, from OP tank to call artillery fire, to ammo hauler, to messenger, to field ambulance. The attraction was good off-road movement ability, and the ability to move through areas being shelled, neither of which trucks could do. I hope this is interesting.

"It is doubtless vain to parcel out the various contributions, but it would go something like this. The artillery park on the eastern bank undoubtedly did more damage than snipers did. The room-to-room fighting of a corps of infantry obviously did more than snipers did. The breakthroughs on the flanks obviously did more than snipers did. The stupidity of the German high command obviously made more of a difference than the snipers did, at least as to the decisive nature of the victory won. The contribution snipers made to the entire thing, therefore, cannot possibly be more than 1/5th, and 1/50th is probably more like it. Somewhere between those two numbers."

Now I feel like I am pulling teeth. I stated that each of several factors was more important than another factor. You agreed with each statement. I take the "more thans" and I collect them. I note the result. You object because the result is a number, as though that involved the invoking of some divine metaphysical power or something, different in kind that statements of "more than". This is simply poppycock. "More than" is a numerical comparison, it says A is numerically larger than B. it is not "different than" "using numbers". Using numbers is exactly what it is; the numbers are just left inside the head doing the comparing and making the statement. I am not talking about wastage, or casualties caused, or morale lowered, or any other mysterious intermediary hidden variable I am not telling you about. I am talking directly about the contribution of various factors to the Russian victory in the Stalingrad campaign. When you agree that of five named factors, four of them are each, individually, bigger than a fifth, then you agree that that single fifth factor is less than one fifth as large as all five named factors combined. This is not tendentiousness. It is not pulled out of my hat or any aspect of my anatomy. It is not a "failure to do research". It is just math! And math simple enough to be done accurately by average 12 year olds the world over! When you have true statements, and you perform truth-preserving mathematical operations on them (like dividing both sides of an equation by five, the rocket science in question here!), then the truth is preserved. The same statement is being made after, as before. But you manage to get into a snit over one, when you agree with the other. This is stooopid. End of argument.

To other Michael (emry) - First, sorry I am always saying Michael when I mean Mr. Dorosh - LOL. I agree with you, the Germans were dumb to attack the city as they did and enveloping it would have been much more sensible. They were sucked into the city by the early successes, I think. See, when they hit the western suburbs the place was scarcely defended. It made sense to try to seize the whole place by a coup-de-main. But in part because of the first Russian counterattacks from the northwest, they did not have time. They then tried a right hook which avoided the strength the Russians had massed for those counterattacks, and this again was understandable. They got well into the city fast, and made rapid progress. They were held up at a couple of fortified points, but these seemed to be the last diehards. In fact, the local commanders thought, when the grain elevators finally fell, that the city had been captured. It wasn't, obviously. But at that point the Russians were losing an entire division every 72 hours trying to hold it, and that was a deal the Germans could certainly afford to take. The next try might have been dumb, but as you see they had been fed on a diet of local victories. The next push was broad, hitting the city from its long side, and offered the prospect of cutting the Russians into many little segments. This one was dubious, but pushing once that way can be understood. When it did not take the whole place, they should indeed have realized that going around would be better, or would have been better in the first place. Here stubborness was taking over. The local commanders did not want to continue the attack into the factory areas - they thought it collosally stupid to assign entire battalions to clear single "workers housing" apartment blocks. And the fighting was anything but cheap by this point. But they were committed. Hitler and Stalin had both already made taking or holding the city a propaganda piece. Large numbers of troops and a month of fighting had already been expended. Where were the forces to take the city for real, by envelopment? Off in the south chasing Baku oilfields and outposting the whole Caucausus. Yes, a plan that did not commit them so far, and instead left force to flank Stalingrad, would have been much more sensible. But that was retrospect. At the time those troops had been sent away, it had looked like the city would fall easily. Still, there is no question the last month of German attacks were motivated by nothing more military than prestige. Fortress fighting for a prestige objective was the last thing the German army was designed to do. It was something out of WW I. Those attacks did reduce the northern suburbs, then one factory area, and finally most of the last pockets in the city. But they were not worth anything like the cost, and doing it sucked armor into the city that was needed on the flanks, and German infantry divisions likewise. If there had been no counterattack building, it would have been dumb still but they would have gotten away with it, basically. By mid November, there wasn't much of a fight left in the city, and while the Germans were still losing men to artillery fire and occasional snipers or holdouts, they were no longer losing gobs of men or material in the city. But there was a counterattack building, and the German reserves had already been spent in that last month of "push". Most of them still could have gotten away, but for the mistakes and pride of two men, Hitler and Paulus. Hubris, as the Greeks would say...

P.S. Michael, had you not noticed that the thread's very second post is a direct request for a weighting of the scale of contribution the snipers made at Stalingrad, compared to all other factors? Spook asked. Why are you upset that I bothered to answer him with a range of numbers, when he asked for a relative weight? Seems very silly to me.

To Michael - I realize you may be so put off by mathematics and mathematical reasoning, that unless something is spelled out for you in triplicate you do not follow where it came from. And you may also have the silly authority syndrome, that thinks any number in a book must be a useful piece of data, and any number resulting from reasoning must be some sort of made up lie. Where you think the numbers in the books come from, may remain a mystery. I enumerated five factors involved in the battle, comparing four of them to snipers as the fifth, and stating what to me was the obvious truth in each case "such and such had more of an impact than the snipers". The factors were - artillery on the east bank, intense room-to-room fighting by the regular infanry, counterattack on the flanks, and stupid decisions by the German high command. So far, no one has registered the slightest objection to these qualitative statements. Well, if A is less than B, and A is less than C, and A is less than D, and A is less than E, then - 5*A < A+B+C+D+E. Therefore - A < 1/5 * (A+B+C+D+E) Therefore, the statement that the snipers accounted for less than 1/5th of the victory, adds nothing to, and follows directly from, the preceeding qualitative statements as to the importance of various factors. Since each of the other terms is only specified as "greater than", we have an upper bound. Since not all factors have been enumerated, and neither has how much bigger each of the named factors was, than the role of the snipers, the real contribution will be some substantial amount less than this upper bound. I just let 10 times be an estimate of what those unknown factors might be, along with a "probably", when I said "and 1/50th is probably more like it". Why you should object to these statements is not at all clear. You cannot object to the less than 1/5th statement, unless you wish to either deny one of the substantive, qualitative statements about snipers importance compared to the artillery, or one of the others, etc. Which you have not done. Or unless you want to object to various trivial pieces of algebra, which would be absurd. Probably you simply did not see the reasoning, and were exasperated because you didn't. And the likely reason for this is that you are exasperated in general by attempts to estimate the scale of things in history after the fact, save perhaps from authorities or something. If you honestly asked yourself the scale of importance snipers might have had at Stalingrad, trying to come up with a number yourself, then I doubt you would have the slighest objection to my estimate. You might perhaps think the 1/50th high, I suppose, though certainly without having advanced any argument why. But in fact, you object merely to a number being put on any estimate at all, not to the particular number I put on it. Tell me, do you allow yourself to make statements including such notions as "more than", "less than", "the main point", or "a trivial matter"? Then you are using numbers in your reasoning every bit as much as I am. You just aren't telling anybody what they are, because you can't be bothered to narrow down what you are actually thinking to a range, and state it. Which is certainly your own business; you can leave your own judgments as vague as you please. It still rather boggles that you should set yourself up as some sort of standard in the matter, and run around objecting when others make more precise statements. If the number or range I give is wrong and you can tell, then say so and present your reasoning. If you can narrow the wide range of my own judgment with a more precise one within my range, and support that by reasoning, then offer away. If you can't, then what in tarnation are you objecting to?

To Jasper - Well, no, that is not what I meant. But I take the point as friendly. I should have explained more directly that there is a difference in audiences. Grogs and wargamers have a full appreciation for the value of intellect in war, perhaps overfull. But the average moviegoer rarely does. It is easier to relate to the morale virtues, easier to put oneself in those shoes. So e.g. the sacrifice of men who held out against hopeless odds in the grain elevators south of the city, would impress the average moviegoer. It was certainly a splendid bit of gallantry. But such gallantry would not have held the city as long as it was held, if not for the clever tactics and deployments of a Chuikov, mated to such efforts. I agree with the point, which I have made before and you rightly call back to my attention, that being right is more than being smart. Part of the point here is that smart can sometimes take away in errors caused by pride, all that it gives in edges won by cleverness. This need not be so, but it is a pitfall real enough to make your reply a welcome qualification to my previous statement.

35mm was probably the peak penetration for this fellow. The Germans tanks were not heavily armored in the early part of the war. The Pz II had 15mm of armor, and the III and IV each had 30mm. The slope on the armor on the IIIs and IVs varied, 0 degrees on some of the sides, 7-9 degrees on the upper front hull, 12-15 degrees on the turret, and 10-21 degrees on the front lower hull (the highest for the Pz III). So front shots would penetrate only at close range and only if the hit was reasonably lucky as to impact angle and such, though any angle it had enough punch for the light armor - Pz IIs, armored cars, halftracks. There would certainly be a number of penetrations that didn't result in kills. The same caliber weapon, incidentally, was used for the AA machineguns on the heaviest Russian tanks, and is still used today in that role. In WW II combat, the main problem with the weapon is simply its weight. I'd expect them to be about the movement speed of a U.S. .50 cal.

Why are people so gosh darn daft? Is anyone following the positions actually being maintained here? Does anyone besides me even remember what the heck we are debating? It is proposed to make fausts in CM 70% accurate at their maximum stated ranges. I say no way in heck. Anyone arguing against what I am saying, is arguing in favor of that proposition. I have shown that no realistic estimate of the tanks KOed by fausts in the war is consistent with any dramatic increase in fausts ability to kill tanks, far beyond CM levels. Everybody else has responded to deductions to this effect with, in essence, "uh, gee, how can you tell?" and a refusal to examine the numbers. Do you think a refusal to examine numbers can justify an increase in faust effectiveness *by a factor of five*? Accuracy at range, or area covered, I don't care how you measure it, that is about how big the change would be. That is what you would get. People are advocating, and I am opposing, a five-fold increase in the combat effectiveness of the faust. They are not proposing the freaking status quo. They have to *prove* that CM is *wrong* about faust effectiveness, by huge amounts. Well, it isn't, it is generous if anything, but in the right ballpark. The faust did not run the table of all Allied AFVs, even though they had millions of them. "Maybe hundreds of thousands in training". It doesn't freaking matter a whit! Play with the freaking numbers you nimnuts! Penny ante factors do not matter, there are 30 of the things for every AFV. So you drop it to 28, what does that change? Nothing. Hey Michael, care to take me on, 800 pt meeting engagement, you take an Allied armor force, I take German infantry, and every time a German squad is within 65 yards of a tank, I roll 1d6 and 1-4 it is dead and you have to retreat it off the board? Think I won't blow you off the freaking map? Is that what you are trying to defend? Are you trying to defend *that*, with no other argument that "I can't tell what the numbers mean, 'cause there's lots o' factors, and so I won't play wit 'em anyways". If you *aren't* in favor of such a change, then kindly say so.

Not quite, Senorbeef. Joe poster starts with his request, and then adds - "and why not take the AI out and shoot it, to make it easier to impliment my favorite tweak?" Since lots of people use that, Joe naturally catches numerous flying brick-bats from people who rather like having an AI, and could care less about the tweak he mentioned.

Since nobody seems to understand this in the popular accounts, I give a short overview of what really happened at Stalingrad. The city is a long ribbon along the west bank of the Volga river. Only a few suburbs on the other side. The city is much longer than it is wide, about 4-5 to 1. Suburbs extend to the north and west. Between these two suburb areas is a unbuilt-up hill, which overlooks the entire city. The south end of the city has the main railroad station, and a large agricultural-products processing area, but few suburbs beyond the warehouses of the latter. The heavy industry is in the center of the city opposite the hill, between it and the Volga. Near the river the bank slants down in a series of gullys, with shacks there at most. The eastern bank is much lower down. The effect is that the river and the area right near it is mostly masked from view to the west, unless the crest of these gullys is reached. That is the terrain. The Germans came at the town from the west, naturally. The city was at first not much defended. As the Germans reached the western suburbs, the Russians tried to counterattack from the northwest, a pattern that repeated itself over the next month, about. They were stopped, but bought time to garrison the city. Then the Germans hooked around into the city from the south, where in a sense it is easier to get right into the downtown. The Russians fought fiercely for a particular pair of grain elevators and for the main railway station. But the Germans brought up the artillery and fired point-blank until the places were rubble, and captured them, though not without prior high losses. These gains also led to the fall of the western suburbs, as their retreat was cut off and they were hit from three sides. All of this part took only a matter of days. At the end of it, the Russians were throwing in reserve divisions to hold the Germans off, and entire divisions were being destroyed in 72 hours. All the local counterattacks on the more open ground outside the city to the north, made very close to the city, had failed completely with heavy losses to the Russians and little cost to the Germans. The Russians were losing the fight for the city, badly. The Russians got a new commander and about an infantry corps of reinforcements. They began to build up an artillery park on the eastern bank of the river, which would fire up into the town over the defenders heads, and could do so in comparative safety. The rear area stuff operated right on the western bank, in the cover of the gullys, and ferries carried new men across regularly. The Russians began using infiltration tactics, especially at night or through sewers, to pop up behind the last block the Germans had cleared and make them fight for it again the next day. There was very little retreating from this point on. Positions only changed hands because its defenders were dead. The Russians waited inside buildings instead of manning the windows, and shot the Germans when they entered; the Germans responded by only entering through newly blasted holes, or through second-floor windows reached by ladders or cross-walk planks from a neighboring building. This all resulted in seige like fighting in which casualties were very high on both sides, and ground changed hands only very slowly. Not satisfied with this, the Germans made a push for the central hill that overlooked the town and took it. From it they could see the whole area and adjust artillery fire. The Russians thought it might lead to loss of the whole city and counterattacked, but again unsuccessfully and with high losses. But they did keep the Germans from making much use of the hill, by simply plastering it with artillery fire from the by now huge gun park on the eastern bank. At this point, the Russians hold the northern suburbs, the factory areas, and the strip along the river bank behind the crest, and nothing else. The Germans launch a large-scale attack into the factory areas from the west. Before this, they had mostly been clearing the city south-to-north along its long axis. Now they are coming in along its narrow axis. The punch through in several places and reach the river-bank, but those incursions are under heavy artillery fire, flanked, and either pull back or get wiped out. The Germans take heavy losses in the factory areas for modest gains there. At the end of this first push from the west, the Russians hold a much-reduced area around the factories, the northern suburbs still, and a shorter part of the Volga bank. At this point the fighting for the city has become drawish. Both sides are losing men in large numbers. The Germans are making continual gains, ratchet fashion, but slowly and two forward-one-back style. The Russians are regularly replacing their losses with new men carried across the river. Meanwhile, outside the city, the Russians are building up two corps-level bodies far away from the city behind the relatively quiet front lines in those sectors. They have already planned to use these for an eventual counterattack to relieve the city, but they wait two months to build them up. The forces grow to army size. Before these forces can strike, the Germans try a mass commitment of armor into the factories area. They split it into two pieces and drive to the river is several places. The infantry takes high losses reducing one of the factories areas, with only a few Russians left or re-infiltrated into outbuildings. The other main factory area is the front line in its sector, with the Russians at one end and the Germans at the other. As in, we hold the blast furnace, they hold the rolling mill, etc. This push also reduced the northern-suburbs enclave to about 1/3rd of its previous size. The Russians by now control only about 10% of the city's area, mostly in two enclaves, one northern suburb and one factory area, plus bits and pieces of the river bank. The Russians are nearly ready for their counteroffensive when the weather gets cold enough, and the river freezes up (November is the month). There are large chunks of ice in the river and traffic over it is impossible, but the ice can't be crossed yet either. The German commanders call for one last push to take the city while reinforcement is thus impossible. The men are mostly exhausted and have not received much in the way of replacements, but they try, on a shoestring. They close the last volga crossings by taking places along the bank, where they can sight light flak and such. They take most of the last factory area, but not quite all. The Russians have less than 1/20th of the city, a few scattered forces holding out in tiny pockets. By this point, the Germans have basically taken the city, which is a pile of rubble, while the Russians still own the eastern bank and shell them regularly. The the Russian counterattacks on the flanks are launched. These are 50-100 miles away from the city. The forces fighting in the city have nothing whatever to do with them. In the north, a Hungarian army backed by a single German panzer division equipped with Czech tanks, is smashed by a Russian army with large numbers of T-34s. The Hungarians are mostly routed within 2 days, and the German panzer division, thrown into the gap, is likewise destroyed, less than 48 hours later. The Russians race west, southwest, then south from this breakthrough, heading for the Don river crossings near the place were the Don comes closest to the Volga, west of Stalingrad. One day after the northern group's attack, the southern pincer is launched, at the long right flank of the German position at Stalingrad, thinly held by mobile German troops partolling a front that stretches south to the Caspian and the Caucausus, and backed up by Rumanians. The Russians quickly break through here too. The Germans get a new commander of the whole area, who is put in charge of scrapping together the bits and pieces of destroyed units to reform a line. He also gets reinforcements drawn from other parts of the front, sent forward by rail to the area of Rostov. The commander in Stalingrad asks for permission to withdraw from the closing pocket westward, and fight to hold the jaws of the pincers apart while extracting his forces. It is denied and he is ordered to hold the city instead. A few forces from the northern suburbs try to delay the northern pincer, but it is hopeless. The Russian pincers meet dozens of miles west of the city, and the German forces there are cut off. The Russians push westward to deepen the breakthrough. First scratch forces, then the railroaded reinforcements, form a line and stop them. A panzer commander helping to do this is threatened with removal and court-martial for retreating. The overall commander in the area offers his resignation and supports his subordinate. The resignation is refused and actions against the subordinate cease. The Russians have the difficulty that covering the whole outer face of the enourmous pocket ties up many of their troops. Attacks straight into the pocket to reduce its size, make some gains but take unnecessary losses, and are soon cut back. The Germans get a few Panzer reinforcements, and use them to launch a relief drive toward the city, trying to snake around and break through the southern face of the pocket wall, in a long right hook. They make considerable progress. As they drive closer to the pocket, the overall commander asks the commander in the pocket to break out toward him. The pocket commander asks for permission to do so from Hitler. It is denied. The overall commander tells him to ignore the direct order and break out anyway. The pocket commander refuses to disobey a direct order. Russian reinforcements reach the relief column's area and stabilize the situation there. Then it is pushed back. The Russians launch another drive from farther north aimed at Rostov, with the idea of extending the cut-off German forces to include the whole army in the south, in the Caucausus region, to add to the encircled forces at Stalingrad. All relief attempts are abandoned to meet this new thrust, and German forces withdraw from the Caucausus as rapidly as possible. As the new front moves far to the west, the pocket size is reduced. The airfields providing the last trickle of supplies into the pocket are overrun. The pocket has been starving slowly for a month or two, all the horses eaten, rations under 1000 calories per day. The Russians launch drives into the pocket and quickly reduce most of it. Several large German formations surrender independently. After several delays and repeated orders to hold out, the commander in the pocket does likewise. One formation keeps fighting despite this, and is crushed a few days later. Now, just what part of this history features a "decisive part" played by snipers, in "taking" the city? From the time of the infiltration tactics, snipers were playing a role in the attrition fight inside the city. They were part of a combination that raised German losses. Other parts were - increasing artillery fire from the eastern bank of the volga; extreme sacrifices by the regular infantry fighting room to room in the grenade-n-spray war; infiltration by regular infantry to areas just taken, leading to repeats of the previous; and large scale reinforcement as troops were lost. But did those things prevent the Germans from taking most of the city? No. They raised the price and lengthened the time. The lengthened time was made good use of to plan the counterattack on the flanks. The high price played a role there too, by drawing German reserves into the city, leaving much of the flanks to the minor axis allied formations. The armor offensive that reached the volga left little in the way of local armor reserves, so that the northern and southern flanks had only about a division of armor each, to cover them - and in the case of the northern one, with obsolete tanks. It is doubtless vain to parcel out the various contributions, but it would go something like this. The artillery park on the eastern bank undoubtedly did more damage than snipers did. The room-to-room fighting of a corps of infantry obviously did more than snipers did. The breakthroughs on the flanks obviously did more than snipers did. The stupidity of the German high command obviously made more of a difference than the snipers did, at least as to the decisive nature of the victory won. The contribution snipers made to the entire thing, therefore, cannot possibly be more than 1/5th, and 1/50th is probably more like it. Somewhere between those two numbers. Movie makers and historical revisionists want to maintain otherwise, purely out of romanticism and the principles of good yarn-telling. Like a boy in his wee jet vs. der massive space monstrosity, it makes better fiction to have the sacrifices and daring of individuals, change the course of the plot. In fact few individuals had any appreciable impact on the course of so enourmous a battle as Stalingrad, and just as obviously the ones who did so were commanders of high rank. Chuikov created many of the tactical innovations that made the fight for the center city so unlike the fight for the southern part. If any one individual kept the city, it was him, and he would be the hero of any realistic story of the defense of the city. His contributions were however intellectual, a matter of his brains, and therefore no one is the slightest bit interested in them. Two other individuals had a decisive influence on the German defeat being catastrophic when it came - Paulus, the commander of the troops in the pocket, for refusing to break out, and Hitler, for ordering him not to, both at the time of the Russian breakthrough (when some generalship was necessary to see the proper course of action) and again when the relief column neared the city, when the situation was so clear-cut that a child of five could have given better orders. But such intellectual failures, caused by rigid pride and unwillingness to face unwelcome realities, are also of no interest to anybody. Nobody wants to hear that intellectual cleverness is useful in war. No one wants to hear that pride is a weakness, akin to putting your own eyes out. They want to hear instead that heroic sacrifices and personal prowess by unremarked everyman's set the course of history. They do not seem to care that that is the "triumph of the will" sort of message, that the loser put all his stock in, and was bankrupted by.

Not quite, either one. When you set your woods foxholes ~28 meters apart, then they are indeed out of LOS of one another. But this hardly means they can be "attacked piecemeal". The entire distance between then, except the last 2 yards, is in LOS of both. Where are the attackers supposed to be, such that they can hit one but not be hit by the other? See, just because A can't see B, does not mean that C, who can see A, can't be seen by B. It doesn't work that way at all. All of your men might be able to see each other, and all of the enemy force could be able to see one of your squads, and that could still be the only squad that could see enemy. Being able to see each other, and being able to see the enemy, are two entirely different things. What the placement avoids, is exactly a particular process of "piecemeal reduction" that can happen if you do put your foxholes in LOS of one another. That process is - attackers concentrate fire on A, and when it dies or breaks, they put a squad in A's foxhole. From that foxhole, they fire on B. Once B is reduced, they put another squad in B's foxhole. Etc. This process rapidly neutralizes the defender's 50% better cover from the foxholes. The attacker's face better cover only until the seize a foxhole. But if the enemy has to *leave* A's foxhole to fire at B, etc, then in every case the defender's will have their cover advantage. The attacker may still try reducing them one at a time, of course. But he gains no cover edge by doing so, which he does get with the closer placement of the 'holes.

Most of the things I'd like to see tweaked don't fit your sense of things, as held up by the AI. I want some unit prices tweaked (wire, infantry with better weapons, flamethrowers and halftracks, uparmored tanks, cheaper fortifications - aside, and less conscipuous ones i.e. bunkers spotted about like guns not vehicles). I want some unit types included that aren't (e.g. U.S. AA halftracks, German SiG assault guns). I'd tweak the allowed point ratios in quick-battles (more flexibility in combined arms and mech, somewhat loosely artillery limits). I'd increase the amount of terrain the defender has to set up in (most of the map in assaults, 2/3rds in attacks, 1/2 in probes), and make typical QB maps longer on the axis of advance rather than shallow and wide. I'd change some of the terrain items in the map editor to allow line and tile terrain (e.g. a wall in brush) or on single side of it (e.g. field up to the edge of bocage without the "strip", or brush up to the right side of a hedge but not the left). I'd like to see the cover model tweaked, to reduce the near-single importance of kind of terrain one is in, and increase the importance of movement state, so that e.g. running through scattered trees was almost as vunerable as in the open, while sneaking in woods would be nearly as good as being stationary in them. %exposed would decline to the stationary level with a delay-timer drop after movement ceased, or to a better level after it just slowed. I'd slightly tweak the targeting model to avoid bunched up firing at nearest targets, especially cowering ones, when other high % exposed targets are available. AT weapons would hold fire unless they had decent hit% or were told otherwise, and squad infantry likewise at range >100m once ammo reached ~1/2 a load. Perhaps vary the "tightness" of this fire discipline / ammo use stuff with quality, greens like now but others tighter. I'd change the groupings of skill levels to make mixtures of green and regular the most common setting, not mixtures of regulars and veterans, which too often leads to the silly all veteran version of WW II, and incidentally masks the effects of the CM command-delay model and all the nuances of the moral system. Since vets mostly do what they are told until crushed. I'd create a "retreat" option like cease-fire and surrender now. Choosing it would prevent one from getting points from objectives but would remove the global morale penalties for exiting units. Fewer fights would end with total desctruction or surrender, more with retreat, as was historically the case. I'd let panicked to broken units be given rally-points or exit movement orders, that they would haltingly head for, instead of wallowing where they are to be butchered. And 10th, I'd make improvements to the AI by including many rule-of-thumb cases, involving things like - artillery use (earlier, but fewer shells per target and more shifts), force mix picks (e.g. take vehicles in pairs), placement of obstacles (in belts rather than seperated, and to deny areas of cover), enemy avoidance (run from artillery fire, HQs trail others, pauses used to stay "on station" while traveling in formation, vehicles avoid places others have died as likely "kill sacks", avoid open ground more, etc), treatment of objectives (pick attack headings focused on enemy more than VLs, to clear flanks and avoid traps better). How many of these do I expect to be done? I've seen improvements in patchs e.g. cost of fortifications. But basically I expect BTS to bring us Russians, and later DAK and Italians and such, and eventually PTO. I do expect some tweaks to items like the above list to be made for CM2, because they are sensible and do not hurt other things. Some may be too hard to program to be worth the effort, others too controversial or can-o-worms, or my opinion on them too idiosyncratic. I'll take what I can get. I don't want anything done that will reduce playability. I am not in the least interested in "IT", aka playing out WW II with single-man counters. Monster, niche, grog-only, "Campaign for North Africa" style overdone stuff, that'd require a full time staff of a dozen trained officers to play, I want avoided above all things. Keep it simply, stupid. That is probably compatible with a few of the things you want - say trenches. Fine by me. I do not want complexity at the expense of playability, but when added items do not reduce playability and somebody wants them, go ahead. As for cases like assault boats, I'd rather they didn't need counters in them to move, but the AI could use them, than like now (if the "river crossing problem", aka who rows?, is the reason it can't). I'd even put up with an idealization about them, like such-n-such a side in this scenario can "move" but not "run" over water, with boats appearing when they do - if such a change made them AI-friendly.

I largely agree, Gonna. I don't see any need for changes in faust effectiveness. What got me started on the subject was someone suggesting that the fausts should be more accurate at ranges near their maximums. Specifically, Paul recommended a hit probability in the range of 70% at the stated ranges, and other fellow suggested extending the ranges a modest ~5m as well. There is no question a faust-60 that killed 2/3rds of the time at 65 yards would produce a slaughter of AFVs in CM, that has no counterpart in the real history. And the reasons such suggestions are made, in my opinion, is that those making them have an entirely exaggerated sense of how commonly and easily German infantry ran around blowing up allied tanks with the things late in the war. The corrective to that view is to have one's nose rubbed in the reality, that the Germans issued (not had at the end of the war) >20 fausts per Allied AFV, and gave them to the supposed ubermenschen cover-boys of Tank-Killer Magazine, and didn't kill even 1/6th of the things as a result. Why? *Range*.

Michael, pick any other number you like that you think more believable ans stick it in, instead. Why is it so hard to get people to play with the numbers? It is not an assumptions game at all. It is a deductions game. The figures go in as trial and error, and you see what they imply for the other factors. You have to get all the factors to believable levels, not just one. If you push on one of them, another will squeeze out. The point of the estimate you picked on item out of, is that it hardly used up more than a fraction of the fausts, and would still kill more AFVs than the allies had. My own conclusion later on, included the item than an average company only killed 1 AFV in 3 months. You can decide for yourself if that is because they were busy sucking their thumbs, or fighting but not getting shots when they did (= range is the tactical problem, which is my thesis statement), or missing (related to the previous).

It is not as rich as the Russians saying they killed more German AFVs, than the Germans ever built. If the Russians claimed they shot a billion Germans would you believe it? But it is just as likely they originally gave correct figures, and somebody in the process of tranfering them to you missed a decimal, or thought a rate per 1000 was a rate per 100. Such honest errors happen. If you take the number literally and apply it to the whole Russian ATG force, then the 76mm figure alone (68,800 x 2.5) is more than twice German AFV production from 1933 to 1945. Without leaving anything for the 45mm, let alone the tanks, the planes, the mines, or the western allies. If you still believe it, I've got some great swampland for you in Florida, cheap.

There is no way those kill figures for the Russian ATGs can be correct. The Germans didn't lose that many AFVs to ATGs. The 3 and 2.5 figures should probably be .3 and .25. Then the kills would be 2050, 330, 2700, total 5050 by ATGs. That is believable. Of course, it doesn't mean that it is true. But any claim that the average Russian ATG KO'ed more than 1 tank, is obviously false. There were more Russian ATGs that dead German AFVs. As for the ammo figures, the Russians used the 45mm not just as a ground mounted ATG, but as the main armament in their light tanks - BT-5, BT-7, T-70 etc. They did not switch over the last of those chassis to SU-76 production until 1944, and they certainly still had light tanks running in 1944. And the 76mm situation is worse. It formed 2/3rds of the Russian field artillery, the whole SU-76 fleet, most of the KV fleet, and above all more than 2/3rds of the fleet of T-34s. The artillery probably consumed the lions share, all HE. The towed and tracked versions probably split the remainder, and then split it again AP vs. HE. Moreover, one cannot compute total ammo production from the runs of one factory at one time. You need total production figures. Because different plants were making different things at different rates and for different periods, etc. The figures for shells produced per towed AT guns are in the range of 250-300 for the Germans. Of those, about 1/2 were AP or HEAT, the latter probably issued as a duel purpose round. The average German PAK probably accounted for 1 Allied AFV, or a fractional number on that order. Does this mean the average PAK fired 150 AP and got one hit? No. It means the factors making for lost ammo, times a last factor of the hit probability of the average shot, together multiple out to around 150. It is unlikely the average hit probability was greater than 15%, that being the case. Why? They were probably firing from their longest range whenever possible, since they would get KO'ed if Russian tanks got close enough to them. What are the other factors that multiply out to the rounds per gun figure? Probably a high figure for rounds left at destroyed guns, a moderate figure for rounds destroyed in transit (e.g. by bombing), a moderate figure for rounds captured in depots, a moderate figure for rounds left on hand. The same sort of analysis as I offered for the fausts and such, in other words.

...unless you shoot 'em down hill. I took out a Panther with a 76 T round recently, front aspect. Because I was up on a fairly steep hill and the range was close, so the impact angle wasn't 55 degrees. Just a tactical tidbit.

I doubt very much that true snipers did hand to hand anything. Certainly, not if they could help it. Everyone got some rudimentary training in hand to hand combat. They also learned to polish their boots, keep their socks dry, scrap carbon deposits off the bolts of their rifles, and for most fill out forms too. So what? The last thing a real sniper was seeking on a battlefield was close combat. The whole point of sniping is to have an entirely one sided engagement, shooting once from complete obscurity and then vanishing. I realise this doesn't make much of a competitive game. Attempts to make it into one, let alone with hand to hand combat thrown in for spice, are sergeant rock comic books. Does this mean that close combat never occurred for a sniper? No. He might accidentally run into someone sneaking through an area he thought was deserted. Or while he fired at a target blocks away, someone nearby might have heard the report and gone after him. Such close combats in urban settings were mostly fought with grenades, not hand weapons or even small arms. The two sides usually could not see each other despite being extremely close, close enough to hear each other. The reason for that is simple - so close, if they can see each other then one of the other gets shot and there is an end of it. Advancing into the other guy's LOS is suicide. So they toss grenades into each other's rooms instead. After the explosion, they might rush into the room to shoot anyone (still) there - or not, and instead throw another. I suspect the whole reason the subject arises at all, besides the sergeant rock effect, is that somebody or other is trying to capture everything that goes on in a massive, prolonged street battle like Stalingrad, all at once. This is mostly poppycock. The snipers did not fight the "grenade-n-spray the room" war. They fought the "sneak through rubble for 3 days to get one clean shot" war. The former of those, the sport of the regular infantry, was much more common and much more deadly. Entire divisions disappeared in 3 days fighting that way. Snipers were effective, precisely because they lived a lot longer than that. They did not take out nearly as many men overall, but they had a much higher KO ratio, because the grenade-n-spray war tended to involve a lot of nearly-even trades.

Nobody else seems to be willing to grappled with the implications of the data. The figures can be pulled out of any end you choose, because they all point to the same conclusion, even when the differ by factors of three. The conclusions may seem obscure, but that is because nobody is accepting the invitation, diving in, and playing the the numbers themselves. If they do, they will find as I found, that you can't put any plausible numbers on each item anyone has mentioned, and get a different conclusion. I will now substantiate those statements. In a typical game of CM, a German infantry company facing a tank-supported force takes out 2 Allied tanks with schrecks or fausts. Sometimes the German armor gets them all, and there is no need. Sometimes the infantry gets 4. Now, let an infantry company get into a fight every 3 days. And let only 1/3rd of them face armor in the first place, even though in the west it was extremely common. And focus only on the last year of the war, when the better infantry AT weapons are fielded (even though the effective schreck has been out longer). Then the cumulative infantry kill score in the last year alone would be half of the combined Allies cumulative AFV fleets for the whole war - far too high. Meanwhile, even if the infantry fired 20 shots each time to produce those 2 kills, on the above assumptions we've only accounted for 15% of the fausts and schreck rounds issued and no longer on hand in March, and only 4% of all the infantry AT weapons issued in the whole war. I estimated the AFV kill % from these weapons at around 10% of the total and said it would be that plus or minus 5%. Another fellow offers the figure of 14%. Fine by me. Now allocate them and work it out. The Allies produce 200k AFV in the whole war and have more left at the end than at the begining. Even if you ignore all the early war ones - by no means an insubstantial fraction, perhaps 1/4th in reality - and ignore the increase in fleet sizes during the war - you get an upper bound of 29,000 AFVs KO'ed by infantry AT weapons. The period said to be covered was Kursk to Berlin so that is 2 years. The German divisions in action vary over the period, but 200 is the right ballpark. In terms of infantry companies that will mean on the order of 3500 of the things. Thus one arrives at 2.5 million "company days", and the AFV kills per company per day comes to 1 divided by 88. Or in other words, a typical infantry battalion might get 1 AFV per month, or a company 1 every 3 months. Not 2 every 3-9 days. OK, now let us take the other fellow's figures and consider the PAK. 68% to artillery, which obviously includes tanks and TDs since there is no seperate entry for them. KOs be indirect HE are likely to be quite small, but the AFVs almost certain outscore the PAK, probably by around 2 to 1. That leads to the implication that around 22% of the AFVs were killed by PAK (and heavy FLAK, included). That is half again more than the infantry weapons. Applying the same assumptions used in getting the upper bound for the infantry weapons, above, that means an upper bound of around 45,000 AFVs by the PAK and FLAK. Gee, that is almost exactly 1 each, 0.9. I conclude from that, that the PAK and heavy FLAK were much more effective because of their superior range; I also conclude that they mostly acted as ambush "get one" weapons, with occasions where they were lost without getting any (e.g. to artillery prep fire) common enough to balance out those in which they ran up higher scores. I welcome anyone who is annoyed by the implications of my numbers, to put his own numbers on any of the items. How many AFVs do you see companies in CM taking out? How common do you think fights remotely like CM ones were, for a typical infantry formation? If you want to revise the figures on formations and lengths of time engaged, feel free, just so you don't depart from the basics of known history. My opinion is that the good infantry AT weapons the Germans had in the late war, had as their primary tactical effect, an increase in the physical security of German infantry on the battlefield, allowed them to maintain formation integrity, and allowed various useful tactics. In particular, they forced the Allies to lead with infantry more often. They made effective, tactics designed to strip the infantry off of the tanks (via artillery, ranged MG and light FLAK fire, etc), because tanks left alone in the defensive zone lost much of the freedom of movement they had had in the early war. They made the Allied tanks stand off and shoot up the German infantry from range, instead of penetrating and breaking apart small German infantry formations. And occasionally, the killed tanks from ambush, blocked roads, or got kills when Allied tanks attempted to avoid the above tactical effects. But with the Allied tanks standing off, and with the ordinary and understandable reluctance to move to close combat with them whenever it could be avoided, plus a tendency to expend the AT weapons at non-tank targets, and when fired at tanks, often at ranges that basically announced "do come any closer" rather than actually killing the things - they did not wipe out the Allied tank fleets, through repeated losses to every German infantry force engaged. The primary tank killers were other tanks and TDs, and towed PAK - heavy FLAK, and the reason for that was their range. I don't think CM is too far off now, but it is leaning to the high side in the effectiveness it shows for these weapons, in my opinion. And upward effectivenes revisions, like ~40% hit probabilities at the rated ranges say, would produce CM kill rates that could not have occurred historically.

The interior parts of the buildings are somewhat safer. Ground floors are much better than top ones, except for a few spotters and the occasional MG to pin people down. Stone buildings are best, obviously. If artillery starts landing around you, and its caliber isn't small (little brown holes not big black ones, small pops from 81mm, etc) then clear out. Don't waste time - use the "withdraw-run" command to eliminate the delay, and get well clear of the area. When the artillery stops falling, run back. It is useful when setting up to forsee this sort of thing. Here are some tricks to help deal with it. First, units that set up outside of buildings will create a foxhole wherever you start them. So even if you plan to fight in the buildings, it can make sense to set up outside, and then move to your fighting positions at the begining. Slow MGs, you don't have to do this - just the fast guys. You can get more foxholes by splitting the squads at set up, then reforming them on the first turn by running them within 10 yards of each other. Where do you want to put these 'holes? In secondary fighting positions, in bodies of woods, sometimes even in the open directly behind a building. Why the last? In case it isn't artillery, but a tank gun. Then instead of taking cover *in* the building, you put the whole building between yourself and the tank, and let him shoot an empty building if he likes. Avoid putting a mess of foxholes in *front* of your building positions, though. Because the attackers can take cover in them, same as you can. For a similar reason, it is a good idea to put foxholes that you place in the woods, just far enough apart that they *can't* see each other (~28-30 meters usually works). That way, if someone captures one, he will have to leave it again to firefight the squad in the next hole. You want to have the men not too bunched up, and you want them to be more spread when they run to their hole than when fighting in the buildings. That way even if the barrage shifts and gets some of them, most will not he hit. Also, you want to place a few long-range weapons with good anti-infantry ability, either HMG teams or 20mm FLAK or 75mm Infantry guns (40mm AA for Allies works too), on the flanks of your main infantry position and well seperated from it. The idea is to cross their fires in front of the place you want to fight in. They can often buy you the time to race back to the buildings (or rubble) after a bombardment, by pinning men trying to reach the same spots from outside the town. By keeping them a ways out, you reduce the chances they will get knocked out by artillery, and the range will also tend to protect them from infantry hitting your center. An AP minefield in front of the place you plan to defend, can also work. And last, two can tango, so you can try putting a TRP ahead of your position, and call for e.g. your mortar fire when he tries to rush into town behind his barrage. By the time he recovers from that, your men can be back in their firing positions ready to rock-n-roll again. Defenders don't have to just sit there and take it.

Direct fire HE is better against buildings than indirect. The reason is that near misses are much more common with indirect, and buildings give very good protection against near misses. 105mm or even 75mm direct fire - from a tank e.g. - will be effective. Indirect 105mm will generally not be effective against troops in stone buildings. If you spend enough ammo, you will hurt some, certainly. But most will live through it. You really want direct fire, or 150mm+ heavy stuff, for towns.

You don't want a mortar team closer than about 150 yards, or you will run into problems with the minimum range. If you are able to get it there safely, and fire it without being observed, that is a fine distance. But if you are firing direct, observed, and the enemy can fire back at the team, then stick to more like 275-300 meters. The reason is that infantry fire is pretty ineffective at those ranges. The accuracy of the mortar will go up somewhat as you get closer. But it is marginal. Most shots from on a medium or small map will have similar accuracy. And if you are going to take reply fire, it is more important to cut that down, than to make marginal improvements to your own shooting. The other main trick firing mortars is to use an HQ to observe for them, with the mortar itself out of LOS, behind a crest or woods or building. If the HQ can see the target, and you have a red command line from HQ to the mortar, then the mortar can "area fire" at the target without LOS, itself. Then there is no reply.

If you cancel the targeting on the marker, it will go away on its own, but not until teh next turn. For what you wanted with the zook team, you can try targeting the tank while taking the team off of "hide" and cancelling the targeting of the ambush marker. Even if the tank is out of LOS, the team will favor that target if it comes into LOS. And zooks normally will not fire at infantry unless you tell them to - or the infantry is real close and they get scared (just to keep you honest). So not being on "hide" might not get you killed. The alternative is to leave the ambush as is and hope the Tac AI waits for a tank target.