LongLeftFlank

Would this be an outgrowth of the belated German mobilization for total war after Stalingrad (as recently discussed at some length), or more in the vein of coopting captured armaments a la the early war Czech "T" series panzers and captured Soviet ordnance. I suppose what I'm asking more broadly is, was the German propensity to incorporate conquered/ captured armaments a manifestation of some "top down" policy pursued by the Reich armaments ministries, or more "bottom up" initiatives that were (reluctantly?) approved to make ends meet? Or a bit of both?

A tiny tangent here, and forgive me if I'm treading well-trodden ground, but I've often found myself wondering whether there shouldn't be some kind of "first fire/ambush" factor that increases casualty probability the first time an unalerted, moving unit is direct fired upon within normal range by a previously unspotted enemy unit. When you're moving, whether in open ground or not, it's pretty hard to hide all your men from enemy in unknown locations. You might take it a step further, and compound the factor for green troops, who have a tendency to bunch, particularly in column, and thus incur multiple casualties from a single surprise burst. That's the main point of having MGs in defilade for example. Don't know if this would tax the AI too much, but it would certainly reflect the RW challenge of modern COIN sweeps and patrols, where a casualty-sensitive US player can't afford to winkle out snipers by letting them pick off the scouts (a la "Big Red One"), but instead has to go slow, and spot them first with overwatch. Whether these kinds of patient, slow, cat and mouse ops are the right subject matter for CMSF, I'll leave to the experts. I'd personally find the suspense quite absorbing, in a game anyway....

Except, of course, for the marvelous Toyota Hilux pickup, bane of the Libyan T-55s in Chad (1984, when paired with TOWs), and of the Russians in Afghanistan (as an all-terrain, and I mean ALL terrain transport).

Hmmm.... Just had us a little earthquake here in Berkeley. While we're discussing US Armored Divisions, I had dinner last night with the transport officer of the 9th Armored Division ("Phantom")... a very spry gentleman of 94. Among other things, he was the guy responsible for hustling as much traffic as possible over the Ludendorff bridge, and later the pontoon bridge, in the days after Remagen. Any otherwise unanswerable questions you'd like me to ask him for posterity?

Very nice, crisp recap of the Iraq campaign, Jason, although I'd hate to explain it to someone who just lost their kid there. But isn't that the key question though, irrespective of whether our army can be defeated or even bloodied in the field? It would seem that the West puts a lot higher premium on the blood of our soldiers than we ever did before. And that -- as always -- is the theory that the West's enemies has counted on: (a) That their troops are more willing to die than ours. ( Kill a bunch of US troops at one time -- a short sharp shock -- and their squeamish politicians pull the plug. Witness Beirut 1983, Mogadishu 1991... Arguably, Tet 1968, Chosin 1950. In WWII of course, only assumption (a) turned out to be true in practice... In 1941, Germany and Japan were convinced that Sturm und Drang / the Bushido code, plus Morgenthau bankers (or was it "Jew-communist" labour unions) stabbing the so-called arsenal of democracy in the back at home, would force the inept, decadent Yanks to sue for peace after the first reversals. The popularity of the America First and other communist and noncommunist backed peace movements seemed to confirm this belief. Pearl... Bataan... U-boat "Second Happy Time".... Kasserine.... Schweinfurt. Hmm, inept, cowardly Yanks haven't caved yet. Bummer. Of course, American authorities were worried enough about public morale that it wasn't until Tarawa that pictures of American dead were allowed to be shown in the press. And there were also the "Why We Fight" and related agitprop, just to make sure we all knew why it was worth it. Contrast today, where every drop of blood spilled -- however tiny from a military history point of view -- is meticulously tallied, and where possible, photographed in real time for the consumption of our profoundly visually-motivated species. And a US administration which has been unable to articulate/sell a "why we fight" either domestically or internationally in spite of its: (Insert Your Bias Here) [ clearheaded and honorable / hopelessly naive / evil and corrupt / controlled by Nazi aliens and the Illuminati ] intentions. But that's politics... Let's stick to the Lessons of History.

Enough material in this thread to write a book on the subject that's much better than anything I've yet seen. I don't post all that much on this forum, but my observations are usually along the lines of "the line between good/evil, insane/sane, brilliant/ stupid, brave/foolish, is very narrow indeed, and we're all at some risk to stray across it." In spite of JasonC's prickly namecalling, which I suppose is the price we pay for reading his well-informed insights free here, I suspect that his bottom line assessment that "it's the megalomania, stupid" is the most accurate evaluation of Hitler's state of mind in 1940-41. BigDuke's post and some of the others describe some of the logical constructs that Hitler might have used to backstop his prejudices (others cited seem to me as less likely to have come to his notice, even if they occurred to others around him). On the other hand, this profoundly selfish and evil man was human, all too human and occasionally betrayed moments of rationality and even self-doubt.... Guderian: "Why does the Fuhrer want to attack in the East at all this year?" Hitler: "I know, the idea of attacking makes me go hot and cold too." And as described by Speer, Guderian and others, as defeat loomed Hitler was prone to fits of inertia, indifference, loss of interest in offensives that had stalled, and what's called "repair service behavior" -- an obsessive interest in micromanaging small details you can still control while ignoring the big picture that you've given up on -- to wit, the "sixteen or seventeen Tigers" anecdote from the bunker quoted by Toland. All are situation-induced forms of "insanity" to which even well-trained professionals are prone to slip into under certain conditions; I've witnessed many in business, albeit not with millions of lives at stake. My favorite business psychologist, Dietrich Doerner, describes many of these behaviors in his excellent book, "The Logic of Failure", which I strongly recommend.

THEY MEAN TO WIN WIMBLEDON

On the Russian intervention question and rational decisionmaking in their command structure, there is one post CW precedent that may provide some food for thought: the 1998 Kosovo intervention. My memory is a little hazy but didn't the Russian VDV contingent make a thorough nuisance of itself? -- unilaterally seizing the Pristina airport and threatening to fire on NATO forces or some such thing? IIRC, the NATO folks had to do some quick sidestepping around them to avoid an ugly confrontation. Of course there was significant pro-Serb sentiment in Russia, and one suspects, among the VDV paras as well.

Rather than flog long dead horses relating to gameplay, I'll venture a wish as to visual "look and feel" for the new game. In addition to stunning 2000 pixel 3D renditions of infantry in their camouflage, complete with authentic helmet covers, unit badges, sweatstains and five days of beard growth, I'd hope to see them "reacting" like men in combat, not like mannequins in a Christmas window display. Infantry in combat don't stand like statues pumping rounds into the enemy. They keep their heads down, they run bent double, they flinch and duck when shot at, or after they shoot. Some simple "body language" would add a great deal to the visual appeal and "grit" of the game and place it well in front of even the slickest FPS. This doesn't have to be a RAM buster. Use the Hanna Barbera rule -- not every figure in the picture needs to be moving at once. About a dozen basic movements, mainly in the head and shoulders, combined randomly, would create a good effect. A figure leans forward and raises his head and rifle slightly, peering out, then returns to the previous pose. A kneeling figure rises to a half crouch, advances a step, then kneels again. etc. etc. Otherwise, for all the astounding detail in the wireframes, the overall effect will be "Attack of the Clones" (and you know how bad THAT movie was). A breeze ruffling the leaves in the light of the setting sun will not compensate for the wooden impassivity of the figures. My three cents worth. Pipe dream maybe. It's OK, I'll buy the games anyway.

I'm hardly the biggest expert on this board, but isn't interdiction fire the most common kind of fire mission? IIRC, a large proportion (most?) of the American shells fired in Vietnam were blind "recon by fire" into jungle around US positions that were too hazardous to inspect firsthand. Blind isn't necessarily ineffective. As has been discussed on this board before, artillery is the biggest killer on the WWII battlefield but its effect is largely cumulative and incidental, as opposed to massive and precise (there are of course many exceptions, but not to be counted on). IIRC, even the heaviest prep barrages tended to suppress more defenders than they killed, a lesson learned in WWI. More generally, I've always believed that CM and other WWII wargames greatly overmodel the ATTACKER's artillery support in terms of its cycle time, accuracy and role in the attack. For a defender, sitting in a prepared OP, often connected to the battery via landline, and who may already have spent days or weeks registering and even plastering the field of battle, I can more readily visualize prompt and devastating "surgical" fires delivered on the heads of the grey (brown) masses. But for an attacker, this is a lot harder to pull off. There are indeed plenty of WWII instances of intrepid FOs moving with the assault forces, calmly spotting enemy strongpoints or counterattackers and calling down a rain of hell on them, all within a few minutes. But pulling this off requires a lot of luck as well as smarts and guts. You have to do ALL the following: 1. locating and occupying a decent vantage point in one piece and THEN 2. spotting the enemy positions that are worth hitting and THEN 3. contacting the battery with balky WWII vintage radios and THEN 4. establishing and communicating the right reference to them and THEN 5. walking the spotting rounds in on the target to FFE Given the above, I suspect that the attacking FO's most common role in the battle was not to blow the enemy out of their positions, but to cement the gains made by other arms, to wit: a. As soon as possible, lay down a curtain of fire on grid squares in front of newly won objectives to: (1) deter and disrupt counterattacks and (2) persuade remaining enemy to leave the vicinity pronto; b. If possible under constraints 1-5 above, zero fire in on any remaining strongpoints against which the attack has stalled. That's my thesis. Counterfire away grogs, I've shot and scot....

That's odd, I posted the above inane comment in response to the "fire" thread and it showed up in this one. Inanely yours,

Having a flashback to good old ASL days, with those hundreds of different Fire/Flame/Blaze counters and pages and pages of fire rules. I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you....

Well, ditch full of roughly butchered meat I suppose... But if you're referring to units being induced by the Tac AI to enter "preferred" terrain even when they know it's been mined, you'd presumably need another set of "tags" for mines that override the terrain tags (i.e. telling the unit to avoid known mines the same way it would reroute a command to cross an unfordable water obstacle)? In reference to the "who's in charge here anyway" issue raised earlier, you might introduce the following protocols that tell the AI whether to obey the player literally or use its best judgement: RUN or ASSAULT commands mean a beeline along the exact path the player has chosen (so long as terrain is passable and morale holds). MOVE/MTCONTACT means get to the waypoint using whatever route offers fastest movement within the 20-30 meter band... i.e. you aren't expecting fire, so follow the road. ADVANCE means get to the waypoint by following (not wallowing in, as in your hedge example) whatever terrain types offer the best cover and concealment within the 20-30 meter band.

Nice discussion here, and I'm excited at the "ditch" reference (OK, OK, I'm a ditch fetishist) ... with the new 8x8 terrain, whole worlds of trench raids and infiltration attacks (think Japanese or NVA sappers) open up that really couldn't be realistically modeled in CMX1. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen requests for a "follow the road" command for vehicles, and it seems to me that a solution to this issue might help with the above command issues as well. Building on the "flags" idea above, would it be possible to embed tags in contiguous terrain features that would be preferentially followed by units in the absence of more specific countervailing orders: roads, trails, ditches/trenches, gullies/ streambeds, walls and embankments. So that way you can issue a "strategic" order with a single waypoint: ADVANCE to that farmhouse. However, the unit won't just beeline across open fields when a nice muddy ditch or a wall is available, say within 20 meters of the direct route. If time is of the essence and you do indeed want them to beeline, well then you tell them to RUN or MOVE (although they may head for the ditch on their own initiative if they think it's safer). This would mimic natural human behavior -- when it's dark follow the road, get in the ditch when you don't want to get shot, etc. without need for a more complex set of orders and waypoints. Perhaps also, you could order a unit to ADVANCE, clicking on a wall, at which time a FOLLOW command would become available whose waypoint terminus would lie somewhere along that same wall....

While I haven't seen explicit reference to this subject, I had always assumed that the primary function of sidearms, at least for officers, in European armies -- particularly the German -- was as a badge of authority rather than a combat weapon. This function might be: a. purely symbolic (i.e. the descendant of the swords which officers carried into action as late as 1900) b. actually used in delivering military justice upon (unarmed) troops, e.g. coup de grace and even summary execution. Hence, the references in some surrender discussions to "officers being allowed to retain their sidearms". c. a compact self-protective weapon useful in the kinds of paramilitary policing and colonial missions faced by pre 1940s armies.

Yeah, I didn't buy Goldhagen's core thesis either. He seems to resort to nasty stereotypes about Germans ("eliminationist" tendencies, etc.) that have some disturbing echoes of Nazi pseudo-anthropology. Upon rereading my earlier post, I realize I'm also being simplistic in characterizing the SS as some kind of Third Reich affirmative action program taking in ex-butchers' apprentices with street smarts to do Einsatzgruppe duty one day and fight Third Kharkov the next with minimal thought or reflection. There were a whole bunch of clean cut university boys in there from the comfortable classes who could recite Goethe, play Brahms and calculate gunnery tables in their heads. Kurt Waldheims. People who should have known better. What was going through their heads, I wonder, when they were told to burn families alive in their houses to save bullets? Did they have nightmares? Look forward to their own deaths in battle as a just atonement? I don't personally believe in "brainwashing" as alluded to by an earlier poster vis a vis Nanking. It's just another form of moral evasion. I believe we stay human 100% of the time, no matter what we're doing. It seems that our natural human need to belong gives us all -- no nationality, class or other human grouping is exempt -- all the tools we need to be induced into awful acts. Heidelberg education or not.

I'm not actually sure that the second motive is any nobler than the first. Ideals and faith can inspire us to great as well as terrible acts. On the other hand, the dark side of not letting your buddies down is "we were just following orders". To quote SLA Marshall and many others, the only motive strong enough to keep a soldier in the line risking his life under fire is comradeship. So when your commander tells your unit to go shoot those Jews, or Bosniaks, or kulaks or infidels or (insert category of human being to be exterminated here), just how easy is it to say no? And it isn't even a matter of "if I don't, I'll be next to them in the ditch". Consider this from Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners": a polizei company from Hamburg -- not SS, not even MPs, just ordinary middle-aged cops -- was deployed in 1943 to Poland to murder Jewish peasant families by shooting them in the woods (very nasty work, up close, blood-spattered and personal). The commander, an avuncular type, felt awful about the job (not that he wouldn't do it of course), and even told his men that anyone who didn't "feel up to it" could be exempt. Only one man took him up on it. And this man confessed later that he felt very guilty about refusing to help out his buddies in the difficult job. Weird, eh? But strangely familiar.... Yeah, the SS cadre drew in a lot of the narcissistic ideologues who got Nazism started in the first place. They're easy to identify as culprits, easy to blame, easy to hate. Their thought process: 1. "I have enough education to be insecure and resentful about what life has given me, so I joined this really great group, and to prove that I/we are the master race (or the beloved of Allah or whatever), we will slaughter our designated enemies like the cattle they are..." But I doubt this was the mental picture of your typical SS man, even Freiwillige. I've run across enough ideological types in government and business to know that they're mostly lousy at functioning in RL. The SS was, whatever else it was, a highly effective fighting force. I suspect that its bulge bracket -- increasing as the war went on -- tended to be big working class jocks who liked extra pay and the chance to belong to a top drawer outfit. Shooting untermenschen wasn't mentioned in the job description, and really wasn't a motivator. Kurt Hausser. That kind. Not an extremist. However, does that create a better outcome when he gets put on Sonderkommando duty? Nope. 2. The aggressive type: "Some boys in the Rollbahn got their throats cut by partisans last week in this sector. This'll teach them to think twice about messing with us." 3. The pragmatist: "Stupid bastards, why didn't they run away when we came up the road? Well, if they're that dumb, that's their problem, not mine. Sorry, nothing personal." 4. The weary veteran: "I'm tired and fed up and cold: let's just get it over with and go back to camp". OK, we all know the believers got the ball rolling. Hang 'em high. But a lot more Jews, commissars, et al, got killed by more or less mentally normal guys in categories 2 - 4. So who deserves our respect or contempt 60 years later? And faced with the same situation, would we all be that one guy out of 150 in the Polizei unit?

Just KNEW that last post would bring the SW grogs out of the woodwork. And JG, there's no need to deprecate yourself as a nerd on this board. Nobody here has any stones to throw...

Not much, since IIRC, total hits inflicted by stormtrooper infantry fire through the first three films consisted of: 1. About a squad of Leia's consular guards (who weren't much better shots themselves) 2. Leia herself (stungun hit) 3. Jawa track, including occupants. Obi Wan makes charitable commment about the "precision" of the hits, but then he's an old school swords guy. 4. Incineration of Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru and assorted moisture farm droids. 5. Ambush hit on Threepio in the cloud city. 6. Random pistol hit on speeder bike on Endor. Imperial armor didn't do much better -- a few gun positions, a generator and a couple of Rebel mini-fighters on Hoth. Oh, and a single Ewok. Guess the Rebel alliance controlled galactic supplies of optical glass or sumfink....

Ah heck, there goes my productivity for the day.... </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> |\_/| ( O o ) |###| o o X o o This is Bunny's sidecap and lapel emblem "Totie". Copy "Totie" into your signature and/or E-Bay listing to help the European courts on their way to sedition charges against you. </pre>

And in keeping with the vaguely anime / Hello Kitty appearance of the original smiley... --------- </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> (\_/) (( (-.-)>_FED===== (>_<) ^ _/ \_(---) This is Bunny's Pact Fellow Signatory, Nambu. Copy Nambu into your signature to help him on his way to East Asia Co-Prosperity for six months (twelve at most). </pre>

I hear and I obey. (has as much to do with the original topic as anything else in this thread... btw - I always take the russkies and avoid the kraut-heads whenever possible...) cheers, bruceb </font>

I'm amazed that Ilya Ehrenburg didn't broadcast an agitprop version of this story featuring the Stakhanovite field kitchen heroically ramming the "Tiger", coating all its optics with borscht and jamming the tracks with turnip rinds... P.S. When I played SL as a teenager, my kid brother would occasionally participate in the game with a single Brumbaer with which he'd basically attempt to reduce as many unoccupied buildings to rubble/fire as possible while the combat swirled around him (inasmuch as a game that allowed about one scenario turn to transpire in a single afternoon play session might be said to "swirl"... In fact, the outcome of most scenarios was resolved by our cats trashing the board. Vae victis).

... And let's not forget Speedy Meyer leading his Panthers around Norrey on his BMW. The master of do it yourself recce (and a right bastard, as any Canadian vet will tell you, but I digress).

I always liked Prokofiev's "Battle on the Ice" from Eisentstein's Alexander Nevski myself... (Peregrinus expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis). And "On the Field of the Dead" from the same work is one of most beautiful arias of all time... ("I'll not marry a handsome man") In a different genre, if I'm attacking with my SS kampfgruppe, I favor Rammstein or a similar German industrial track, cranked up over the nebelwerfers.