LongLeftFlank
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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Except the Germans, who promptly sent captured weapons back to the Fatherland for rapid reengineering and improvement.....
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Still switching back and forth between the background research and modding (while hoping BFC releases the 2.0 Upgrade soon so I can get that Editor upgrade and do the master map).
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Hmm, you sure you can't do a simple AI plan for the Germans to make this a 1 player? I quickly read through the historical account and they seem fairly static.... Seems like their counterattacks were about as skilled and successful as the AI's would likely be on this ground.
JAC
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Wow, you're almost as crazy as I am. Great map!
Be careful with "fanatic" though, wrt the Germans. That term tended to get tossed around a lot by American writers, when they really meant "stubborn" or "fought harder than we would have in their situation". I haven't skimmed your document yet, but barring strong evidence of them repeatedly conducting suicide attacks or fighting "to the last man", I'd recommend you top off their morale at High or maybe Extreme. Fanatic in the game really is fanatic - they literally don't give up until killed and recover quickly from Pins. Be hard to see why they'd behave that way when so much of the DAK had already surrendered.
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Yet again John, what on earth does this kind of ephemera have to do with Dien Bien Phu and CMBN scenario design? Nothing, that's what. If you must know, "la Cuvette" means "the toilet bowl" -- that's what the French transport pilots began calling the valley, and that name caught on as things started going downhill.
In any event, it's quite clear you found the very things I did as far as most of the maps and photos.Well aren't you just awesome. I suppose I'll start being impressed when you actually do something useful with those mad research skilz.
Here, read something interesting: Declassified ARPA translation of 1957 French "lessons learned" paper on Indochina War.
Those bo doi and dan cong (coolies/porters) were some busy beavers.....
And I have no idea how this guy could possibly assert a copyright over a snipped portion of a NIMA map section, so I am going to ignore that, although I'm not reproducing the map itself here, just a link.
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PM me with an email and I'll send you my research notes to date, which include extensive quotes from Jules Roy's and Windrow's books (you'll have to look up page numbers yourself, sorry). I also PDFed Windrow's maps, although I'm not posting them here out of respect for copyright.
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OK, in a desperate last ditch effort to clear the fruits and nuts out of here, I'm going to saturation bomb my own thread with a bunch of maps and imagery that will bore everybody to tears but will be helpful to me as I pin out my master map of the GONO central fortified zone. ZULU KILO, feu sur ma position. Vive la Légion! Out.
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No more mention of NASA, flying saucers and other such nonsense here!
And this is NOT a general discussion thread to BS and bicker at length about any and all things Dien Bien Phu, or dump link after link after link. DBP is -- mirabile dictu! -- a Large Topic, with lots and lots and lots of stuff available on the Interwebz, in multiple languages. JK, that includes lengthy comparisons to Khe Sanh, which has been done to death in other fora, but has no application whatever to designing interesting CM scenarios for the First Indochina War. Either go to a different forum -- armchairgeneral seems like a good one -- or start a different thread in the BFC General Forum.
Same thing goes for the irresolvable "Who Were The Good Guys?" discussions, or whether Ed Lansdale and Lucien Conein suckered Uncle Sam into Vietnam at the behest of the China Lobby or United Fruit or the Luciano mob.
On the other hand, the role of artillery in the battle -- whose quantity and quality, it seems, still isn't entirely settled history -- is a relevant discussion. More on that later.
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Whenever I get around to finishing my "playtest" with SBurke, I'll release it together with the few mods (modded SF uniforms, Shopfront, vandalized Assad poster). Unlike Ramadi, you can play this with just the CMSF base game.
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Agreed, although one of my favourite all-time CMBO scenarios was also one of the first I played -- the shootout in les Tuileries. And that one is a fairly sharp fight.
Also, has BFC ever indicated that Free French forces will be in the OMG module? 'Cuz I'd definitely love to get French voices (and forces) for my other project....
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I agree 100%: ad hoc Sergeant Rock behaviour with enemy weapons is an EXTREME outlier for reasons cited above, but would be instantly abused by various gamey bastiges. Go play a shooter if you want to do that kind of thing.
Regarding the OP, my own expectation is that we finally get the tools needed to represent late war urban combat: e.g. flat roofed / industrial buildings and warehouses (oversized barns with thicker walls), low walls topped with railings (i.e. you can shoot through them but not readily cross. Perhaps also townhouses with entrances half a level up (those stairways themselves provide cover). Maybe some distinctly urban flavour objects, like rail cars or derelict motor cars.
And that also has GOT to mean fires and flamethrowers. There's only so long you can put this off.
Remember, this module content will be focused on Market Garden, but should also touch upon or at least enable the savage battles for Brest, Paris, the Channel Ports (e.g. le Havre), Metz and Aachen. BFC and the bulk of the game's audience are (IMHO) tank-vs-tank-shootout biased but there's only so much truly novel to add in that area in fall 1944, beyond some later model vehicles and those Panzer Brigades JasonC is so fond of bashing.
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There's a great old joke I'll bowdlerise here about a management consultant who approaches a shepherd and offers to guess his profession in return for one of his sheep. After some extended reasoning, he guesses accurately, of course.
Then the shepherd replies: "You are clearly a consultant, and this is how I know. You gave me detailed answers I already knew to a question I didn't ask. Now give me back my dog"
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OK John, I sincerely apologize for the ferocity of my earlier post, which is not the norm for me.
I just hit AUGH! the moment it became clear to me that you'd largely clicked the footnotes on the Wikipedia article and then followed them -- which I did as well, among many many other things. I just didn't feel the need to post them stream-of-consciousness style. It's a level of detail that clouds, instead of advancing, discussion of the topic at hand which is (or ought to be): how would one create interesting and historically insightful CMBN scenarios around Dien Bien Phu (or the First Indochina War in general)
John, your opinions on the topic -- mainstream or not -- are welcome here.
Just understand, it's kind of socially boorish to attempt to footnote someone else's conversation -- often with source material we would not ourselves choose or endorse -- without really participating in it. "I just thought you might be interested" isn't sufficient.
However you may intend it, that's about as "helpful" as standing over a chess player's shoulder and making suggestions.
I hope you understand now. Your friend, LLF.
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JK, I'm sure this didn't occur to you, but I find your initial comment condescending and insulting. You want to see backblast, go ahead and do it, jackass. Download a hex editor and knock yourself out.
Oh, you can't, huh? Maybe it requires a little more effort and applied intelligence than vomiting out a few randomly selected google results, adding a bunch of "gosh, even *I* never knew that!" comments, and then smugly pronouncing it "required reading".
As is usual with you, the links you furnish are scattered retreads of vastly more comprehensive source material that is available on this very well-documented battle. Material you could actually find if you actually understood what research is. This spam provides little to no insight of any help to me in designing DBP scenarios for CM.
I have no idea who hired you as a "threat analyst" but in your (undoubtedly brief) tenure, you clearly never gained a grasp of analytical method. Moreover, you seem congenitally unable to draw indicative conclusions from what "data" does come under your nose. You're more like some backwoods shaman reading portents from chicken bones and cackling "aha! You see?" all day, to nobody in particular.
Let me make it easy for you: keep this rubbish out of my threads! Go posture as Autodidact Super Genius Professor of All Things Military somewhere else.
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Borrowed a SPG9 wireframe from CMSF to represent a VietMinh 75mm M20 recoilless gun (base weapon is a 6lbr British Airborne ATG).
No backblast, but ya can't have everything.
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Depends. In my experience, Fanatic Regular (modded British) infantry will reliably execute a Fast move across open ground into enemy positions; guys will still Pin but rally pretty fast. As in RL, the success of the charge depends on defending firepower. And as in RL these charges rarely succeed
The primary threat to the defenders is actually hand grenades, not (abstracted) bayonets and rifle fire. If the attackers get that far....
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OK, getting a little too political here. Big bad Dulles, United Fruit, Aramco yadayadayada.
After a 2 week break from CM, I'm getting ready to start pinning out the master map of the entrenched camp and environs. I was tempted to wait for the 2.0 Editor upgrade, but I think I can manage.
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Oh, you'll be getting some trench warfare all right. Just not WWI. I am finally starting work on my CMBN Dien Bien Phu master map this evening....
I'd guess the same CMers who dislike PTO are the same ones who also hate bocage (and probably urban combat too). In all these environments, you're fighting the map as much or more than the defending army, which is usually either heavily outnumbered (German) or plagued by obsolete tactics and equipment (Japanese, early Russians), and using the terrain as an equalizer.
Add to that the fact that after mid 1942 the Japanese forces were simply no match for a first line Western army (the British Indian Army didn't count until early 1944) and were simply annihilate in stand-up fights between equal numbers. Other than the occasional ambush of a patrol, the only way the Japanese "win" is on points, i.e. making the Allies bleed. (Shades of much of CMSF!). So it really isn't that much fun to play the IJA side more than once or twice for novelty value -- it's the setup of the defences that primarily determines how they perform, not the use of the forces. In fact, any substantial Japanese tactical movement generally results in a bloodbath.
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The French first wavered and then accepted, but as you say, the British remained opposed throughout.
I have no doubt that feelings were pretty negative in America too -- after all, the US hadn't used the Bomb in Korea/China, even though it was largely the US 8th Army at risk (retreat from the Yalu) and MacArthur was requesting it. The shocking thing was that it was offered as an option to the French at all. I haven't finished Windrow yet though.
But it seems like pretty much nothing short of groundbursts by a couple of 5-10KT A-bombs could possibly have broken the siege by mid-April. Maybe not that even.
As Sublime notes, the 60 B29s available from Clark AB (the Phillippines) couldn't possibly deliver enough conventional payload to silence the well dug in Viet Minh guns or cut Giap's supply lines. At best, carpet bombing *might* have been able to cover a determined breakout across the hills toward Laos, which would still have been a costly, horrific rout and an epic defeat, but *might* have saved as much as 1/3 of the GONO troops from the ordeal of captivity.
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Yup, although the success of the Demyansk airlift is part of what what led the Germans to believe they could keep Stalingrad going until the expected relief thrust broke through.
Thing is, the insanity only became truly clear in hindsight. Navarre assumed he could break two VM divisions and whatever limited arty they hauled 300 miles through the jungle mountains. Probably true enough. And if more unexpectedly showed up he could simply withdraw, because he'd get plenty of advance warning and his mobile forces would give him space in the valley to protect the airfields. None of that proved true but it seemed plausible at the time. The French commanders were not in fact pompous bumblers.... well, OK there was some pomposity.
As to fanatical Communism, it certainly existed but not in the way the agitprop wants you to believe. Total obedience to orders and the will of the Party was the message 24x7, with ostracism or death the penalty for failure. Not unique to them of course; iron discipline doesn't always equal combat results or else the Russians would have done better in 1920, 1939 and 1941. The rest of the Vietminh combat performance seems to me to be a function of good camaraderie plus increasingly competent higher leadership not putting them into unwinnable battles. The Communist idealism generally showed up before and after battle.
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"“A thousand pigeons, each with a two-ounce explosive capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target,” Wing Commander Rayner wrote, “might be a seriously inconvenient surprise.” Not least, of course, to the pigeons."
Wot, held underneath the dorsal guiding feathers?
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No, CMSF is an earlier edition of the engine and is staying that way although ImHO the changes are not massive. Lack of hideable entrenchments in CMSF is the only one that springs to mind.
Make sure you get the latest patches for both games. Have fun!
Flanking The Fortress - Hill 531 (Tunisia) - WIP
in CM Fortress Italy Maps and Mods
Posted
Re AI, PaperTiger is generally correct, but IIUC, the VC for this battle is driven by securing a bunch of hilltops, a limited objective set. And the German counterattacks could be timed to occur later in the game, so that if the US hadn't yet taken the objectives, the game would be already lost anyway. Based on a quick readthrough of the AAR, the German CO would be unlikely to fail to try, even against the odds, as it appears they had "hold at all cost" orders for these strategically dominant features.