LongLeftFlank

Great stuff, JasonC, and thanks also Andreas. Speaking hypothetically, was there anything the Germans could have done militarily (suing for peace was another matter) to stop or even blunt this Soviet offensive juggernaut after mid-1943? In other words, was Bagration or some similar annihilation battle not bound to happen in 1944, if not around Minsk, then elsewhere? Sure, I get that this is all hypothetical, that Hitler was still a loon, that many core Wehrmacht doctrines hadn't kept up with the times or the enemy, and that in macro terms Overlord was coming no matter how the Germans did in the East (and if not, then an atomic Gotterdamerung was on tap for late '45). But what if, say, the Germans had (drawing on some themes from prior threads, for which I also thank you): (a) Pulled DAK from Africa intact to create the cadre for a new panzer army ( Accelerated full mobilization, and speeded absorption of Luftwaffe and navy cadres (say, 20 net new infantry (VG) divisions above what they actually mobilized by early 1944). © Pulled the exposed armies from Crimea and the Leningrad/Baltic to shorten the front and get behind water/swamps. After the fall of Kiev and the Dnieper line, conduct a general withdrawal to _______________?, a more favorable line from which to blunt and halt Red Army winter offensives. (d) Doctrinally, rather than throwing away PDs in "overscoped" counterattacks as soon as they detrained, paired them with new model VG divisions to beef up their infantry strength/staying power and deployed them in a linebacker/ counterpunch role. (e) Since we're talking about Nazis here, in addition to "scorched earth", forced removal of as much of the male population as possible from areas being evacuated to deny the Red Army its recruiting base. Their most likely fate: slavery and starvation, just another grim chapter in the Holocaust. But a serious military effect? (g) ___________________ What might have been the net impact, if any? What might the Russians have done in the winter of 1943-44 faced with a more "drawn-in", reinforced and flexible German defense?

I'd respectfully challenge that assumption. I think you'll find that most American gamers grew up with a German tank fetish like everyone else. Suspect the reasons for this are: a. As we know, Tigers, Panthers and Jagd---s made a pretty strong impression on the GIs (Tommies and Ivans too), and those who cared to tell war stories passed that on to their kids postwar b. Also, don't underestimate the influence of Tamiya, whose distinct preference for German AFV model kits (aircraft are another matter) shaped a whole generation of US kids. [Conspiracy theory] And by exposing geeky Boomer kids to the heady fumes of Testor's model cement, turned them into crazed peacenik acid-heads instead of future Skunk Works engineers, thereby paving the way for Japanese technical dominance in the 1980s. Banzai!!!! [/End Conspiracy theory]

I'm sure this has been discussed under the CMC forum or somewhere, but I'll take a crude shot. If I understand aright, you've artificially divided your battlefield into a chessboard grid of individual battles (squares). The ability for outcomes in one square to affect neighboring battles must either be: (a) ignored ( abstracted in some manner, or © handled via a CMC type system (which is in effect, a different "meta-game") If it's a deep thrust along a mountain road or some other kind of restrictive terrain in which your flanks are assumed to be reasonably protected (i.e. the grid is one square wide), then your model works fine. Each battle only depends on the outcome of the previous one. A grid might even work for a WWI or Kursk style assault on prepared positions in depth, in which the axes of attack are well defined for each unit and units aren't expected to have the stamina or mobility to outflank the neighboring defenders. They simply struggle onward to their Day 1 objectives and stop. Otherwise, using the grid system, you'd need to fight all your active battles in parallel, turn by turn. Whenever one battle concluded in a given turn, the victor would be able to schedule some or all remaining units to enter neighboring battles as reinforcements (perhaps outflanking the opponent). These units wouldn't have had a chance to rest or refit, so you'd need to manually "tweak" their remaining ammo, casualties, damage, fatigue, etc. Very time consuming unless CMSF allows a way to "snapshot and clone" a force at the end of a battle. A much cruder alternative might be to set up some kind of Wolfram cellular automaton (JasonC, where are you when we need you?), wherein battles are fought row by row (groups of 8 if it's chessboard), and then the OB and axes of attack for each new row of battles is determined by the outcomes of battles in the 3 adjacent squares of the previous row. Or something like that.

Hmmm, I like to be down and jiggy with the latest internet jive talk, but I haven't run across this particular usage of "Sock Puppet" before. Is this a Dorosh innovation? Someone needs to update the Wikipedia entry. All your sock puppets are belong to us!

42 next month, and my dad bought me AH's Blitzkrieg when I was 10.

Oh, and Pinetree, re your sigline, that isn't the first time Microsoft's ad agency has been a little more clever than it quite intended: A notorious 1997 TV ad for Internet Explorer used as its score Mozart's Requiem, in which the chorus intones: Confutatis Maledictus Flammis acribus addictis.* 'Where do you want to go today?' , is the cheery line displayed on the TV screen. * The Latin translates to: 'The damned and accursed shall be consigned to the flames of Hell.'

This is what discussion threads look like on the surface of Jupiter.

"A Marine Corps of One"

"Intellectual terrorism" is a bit over the top, Michael, although your subsequent cautionary point is accurate. But as a brother soldier, you might cut LTCW some slack. He's serving in a force that is actively at war with Zarqawi (who is one of the few enemies to have declared himself, and THAT's the main problem in this war). It is an ancient (e.g. Iliad), normal and psychologically needful custom to demean and dehumanize one's enemy, and to rejoice in his death. That doesn't necessarily mean one takes him for granted (although it might mean that, as you say). Zarqawi was no Yamamoto. As for his bravery and other talents, which he might have put to far holier and more productive ends in life, let him now account to Allah for the choices he has made. And congrats to the US military for speeding up the meeting.

... Do they also hold their MGs precariously on the tops of their feet? And do adorable baby Soviet infantry in fuzzy gray camouflage eventually appear once daylight returns to the Karelia front?

Due to a combination of RL and personal preference, I've tended to favour single sitting tiny/small <500 pt paradrop, patrol and partisan QBs vs the AI, where victory rides on good use of infantry tactics, recce and terrain, not on armour and artillery. I favour night/low viz and iron man rules, plus a chess clock to keep the games short and tense. Pacific WWII or 'Nam would be the dream evolution for me, personally. I'm looking forward to seeing how CMSF refines the fine details of infantry combat, as well as how much smarter the AI gets. I'll probably still play small QBs where Marines are forced to leave most of their heavy stuff behind and go in squad on squad.

In 3 years as full time "Mister Mom", my brother -- the lucky so-and-so -- has had leisure to finish the entire Morrowind and Dungeon Siege series, as well as advancing 2 characters over 70th level on Evercrack). I have completely failed to interest him in CM -- "too much thinking and weak graphics" -- he says. I in turn deride his preferred genre as "Hit It With A Stick (And Win A Bigger Stick)" His response was to name a character HIWAS AWABS in my honour....

(Briefly scans EXTREMELY deep and muddy rut on dead end trail leading to bottomless swamp, passes bog check, reverses the heck out of there)

Hmm, John, I've been a consultant for 10 years now, but if you can find a way to tie use of the word "surely" to a "specific probability range" that is endorsed by the US intelligence community, I shall bow down in shock and awe at your superior wankery-skills. (Knocking myself off my own grammatical high horse BTW, "surely" is an adverb, not an adjective as I stated above -- incorrectly )

While I don't expect non-native English speakers, particularly engineers, to write (or edit) flawless King's English in this day and age, this piece definitely crosses well into AYBABTU, throwing the credibility of the entire article into question. Warning flags: general use of passive voice ("it has been known that") and biased adjectives ("clearly", "surely", "apparently"). If the author has sources and data to substantiate his assertions, he needs to quote them, not layer on weasel words. No sale, sorry.

Especially if it's a Syrian government contract... Code more quickly, infidel dogs, or by the false teeth of the Prophet, we will show you a different kind of "skinning".

Name that film.... Patrick Swayze: "Wait a minute. I thought there were a billion screaming Chinamen." WHOOOSH!!!!! Powers Boothe: "There were."

I am shocked, shocked that anyone should intimate such a thing. My mum is kicking herself for not putting everything into oil stocks the moment those two got elected. Just spent a half hour in a gas line at Costco (haven't done that since 1977). And overhearing the conversations at the pumps, the GOP could be in for a nasty surprise in November. Gerrymandering or no. A lot of drive-thru-megachurch "Red" America is perfectly willing to vote Democrat if they get pissed enough.

"The next three days will be terrible...."

I'd point out also that white US social attitudes and policy towards Indians, even at the time, were a lot more conflicted than that shown by Germany toward Jews, or by Hutus towards Tutsi. US opponent Tecumseth became a widely admired folk hero -- the Saladin of his day. The honesty, loyalty and self-reliance of Indians was as celebrated (though just as stereotyped) as their courage and savagery (e.g. James Fenimore Cooper through Frederic Remington). The Wounded Knee slaughter was decried as a scandal and a national shame in its own day, and not just among Boston Brahmin Transcendentalists. Chief Seattle's speech (the original, not the crunchy 1970s fabricated one) survives because it was widely published in white US newspapers. Again, romantic images of Indians didn't match actual attitudes on the ground: at best condescending (church sponsored Indian schools), at worst lethal (pestilential internment camps). But hardly the picture of a US Final Solution, or a Manifest Destiny gleefully built on heaps of Indian skulls.

Abbott, you argue your side as well as I've seen it argued, but you are engaging in hyperbole, however sincere and visceral your feeling. It may well be right to reach for harsher words than "assimilation" to describe the privations endured by Native Americans from 1500-1920 or so as they were encircled, displaced, at times killed/caused to die, and universally marginalized, but GENOCIDE is simply not the correct word to apply relative to the real genocides of history. And selective quotes from US presidents really don't bolster the case. In the 1944-45 period, you can also find numerous quotes from Western leaders, most notably Churchill, forcefully advocating the mass destruction of the German intelligentsia and Junker class, and the reduction of Germany to a level of near-starvation agrarian subsistence. Understandable in context, given two world wars, 4 years of total war and savage bombing, plus growing evidence of the enormity of Nazi crimes. What really matters is whether these emotional statements were implemented as real policy. Context matters. Prior to 1783, the Iroquois -- encouraged but not led by the British-- had carried out a number of very violent raids on white settlements deprived of their military age males who were away fighting for the Patriot cause. Whether or not their motive was: a. rolling back recent white encroachment b. exacting revenge for past white aggression c. seeking loot and scalps from weak neighbors (the JasonC theory) their actions were sufficiently barbaric that barbaric postwar American reprisals can be understood, if not justified either. But we can argue "who started it" until doomsday. The undeniable fact is that Sonderkommando Sullivan didn't execute Reichsfuhrer Washington's orders very thoroughly. Most Iroquois survived, scraping through 1784-1930+ on the usual meager combination of day labour, barter, subsistence farming, and (later) white charity. Not pleasant, not easy to escape even today, but also NOT genocide. I'll leave it to someone else better versed in US history to defend the other 3 presidents on Mount Rushmore -- IIRC, all 3 also spoke and legislated in favour of Indians at other times. No, they hardly rolled the clock back to 1491, or even followed up to ensure that Indians got a square deal to match the lofty rhetoric. But neither they nor the US government were the rabid Indian killers you paint them as.

I've taken the liberty of forwarding the above discussion to some friends of friends in the Princeton physics department. They may be able to either rebut or illuminate your argument. I'll let you know. I generally think of myself as being among the better educated people I know, but you've definitely left me in the dust with this one....

FWIW, back in Jan '89, a Dutch friend and I retraced the Ardennes attack (and massacre*) route of Kampfgruppe Peiper, using the Osprey book as our guide. At a few places, we wandered into the woods to see what the terrain was like. Typically, there's only a lot of underbrush adjacent to settlements and main roads. Pine stands on level ground have a dense canopy and offer little ground cover beyond dense needles, treefalls and ground undulations/watercourses/ditches, but the low light plus density of skinny, scraggly trunks heavily impairs vision beyond about 150m or so. Nasty places for sniping, ambushes and treebursts. I vividly recall one such spot about 50m off the small dirt road near a lumberyard called Buchholz (not the station AFAIK) where I stumbled across a small memorial marker to a US major killed at or near there in early Jan '45 (counterattack). As you get into wooded slopes (e.g. the Ambleve valley up to Stoumont), you get older, thicker trunks, but a less uniform canopy so there are small saplings fighting for light as well. There's also more fallen trunks as well as small rivulets and gullies and boulders to offer cover. * Not to slop over from a now tiresome separate thread, but all that about the infamous Baugnez crossroads massacre being mistaken identity is just more Waffen SS fanboy greywash. We ran across 3 other memorials to GI and civilian prisoners murdered by SS along Peiper's route -- not so many dead as Baugnez, but groups of 5 - 10 victims, too many to be anything other than deliberate murder.

Not sure that he's represented anywhere that: (a) being assimilated was anything like a pleasant experience for the aboriginals at the time, or for their immediate descendants ( that it was wholly irrational (as opposed to pointless) of them to fight, given their existing cultural norms, or © that the settlers/US Government were just nice hardworking Protestants happy to embrace their "red" brethren into the melting pot with open arms as equals so long as they clothed their nakedness, feared Jehovah and tilled the land. We all know this wasn't the case. Assimilation was a long journey (still ongoing). Up to 1900, unprovoked massacres, forcible evictions and naked land grabs did occur. Numbers of natives died of exposure and neglect when penned into de facto concentration camps. Well into the 20th century, racial discrimination and the poverty culture made reservations very hard places to escape from for those who couldn't pass for whites. It's only been in the last 20 years or so that most North Americans have felt no stigma (even pride) about revealing native ancestry. But all that is a LONG LONG LONG way from mass graves, programmed extermination and gas chambers, or the systematic enslavement/rape or death by starvation that was the inevitable fate of overrun groups in prior centuries (are there any aboriginal Celts left in Poland?). In fact, the fate of the North American natives was about as fortunate an outcome as overrun aboriginals got anywhere at the time, excepting perhaps New Zealand and Polynesia (and their intelligentsia ain't thrilled to bits with things either).

I long ago accepted JasonC as my personal lord and saviour. Although he's more of an Old Testament smiting and fulminating type of prophet. Jason, speaking of (meta)physics, if you ever came into physical contact with Noam Chomsky, do you think an enormous explosion would result as you annihilated one another? Or would a rift simply open in the space-time continuum (you know, the one you apparently employ in order to do all this writing). Nunc dimittis P.S. Yes, yes, I know it's Holy Thursday and I'm blaspheming. But I gave up a whole load of stuff -- including CM -- for Lent.