LongLeftFlank

Well, letting the enemy fight his way into your defensive belt and then counterpunching his breakthrough force with reserves, is not passive. But I must say, I don't know of a WWII army that positioned 'linebacker' divisions (or brigades) in this way, unless you count the small US TD formations. Once the Alllies had gone over to the offensive, I suppose they didn't see the need for it. (Postwar, the '2 up 1 back' US brigade formation was presumably a 'linebacker' approach) The Russian defense at Kursk, as I understand it, was more 'sliding' new divisions into prepared provisions in front of the German advance ('The next 3 days will be terrible. We must see they break their necks!') than counterpunching, with the exception of the Prokhorovka debacle. But I'm sure there's a Kursk expert who can validate that.

Well, without making too many excuses for the purely extractive VOC colonial plantation project of 3 centuries, beginning in the 1910s the Dutch did begin, belatedly (and following the British example), to make very serious investments in local infrastructure and education. 1. As I understand it, having had the good fortune not to lose a generation of youth in the Great War, the Netherlands recruited, trained and sent out a fresh cadre of talented administrators and engineers. These rapidly displaced the post-VOC old guard, and delivered very remarkable development in the 1920s-1930s. They also opened the colonies to (regulated) foreign investment, attracting significant capital from Britain, America... and Japan. ....On the infra side, Bandung's Art Deco district (and the military cantonment now housing the infamous Siliwangi Division) is still quite wonderful, along with similar though smaller developments in Surabaja and Semarang. I've visited a 1937 hydro plant in southwest Java that is still running beautifully today. The railway system (there's a wonderful museum in Semarang) is still a tremendous asset, although nothing much has been done with it since 1945.... 2. Naturally, the elite Indonesians the Dutch trained up to share the administration (and the wealth) in their own homelands were heavily nationalist-socialist in outlook, in the intellectual fashion of the era. They wanted the Dutch out, more or less instantly. The Dutch police authorities, like the British and French, were ill equipped to deal with bright student 'subversives' from the favoured classes, so their scattershot crackdowns merely generated resentment without quashing the movement. And as you note, the imperial model had started to come under criticism back home, as early as the 1890s. There was also the ambiguous position of the large (non Muslim) Chinese commercial class. They were overwhelmingly in favor of Sun Yat Sen (who, let's face it, was pretty much a commie, though totally ineffective as anything more than a figurehead) and hence left leaning, at least the nonpropertied ones. Nonetheless, the bigotry and resentments of the Indonesian bumis made it hard to make common cause. 3. The 1942 Japanese invasion wiped out the Dutch administrative cadre, along with about half a million locals, including Chinese, Muslim datus and slave workers. After realizing the Japanese were not in fact their liberators, but slavemasters, the nationalist cadres went underground where they learned the basics of guerrilla warfare and organization. 4. In 1945, things got violent pretty fast upon proclamation of Merdeka. In a number of places, most notoriously Surabaja, Dutch families who had survived the Jap camps were massacred by locals. This didn't incline the arriving Dutch forces to negotiate. Since the revolutionaries were no Viet Minh, being riven by intrigue and personality clashes in the ancient Javanese palace backstabbing tradition, the Dutch and their local allies (basically everyone who wasn't Muslim or Chinese) were able to regain control over the major cities. But their limited local support base (the Japs had killed the conservative Muslim leaders) led to an extended stalemate, until they finally gave up and exited.

Ha ha, you would like my Oostindischer friends, Aragorn. Their parents returned to postwar Holland with stories of beheadings, eating rats etc. and their families were all like, 'that's nothing, we had to go without cheese for a whole winter in '44-45!' So many of them simply re-expatriated, where being the scion of British colonial administrators myself, made friends with their kids. We are 19th century people. Funny thing is, we also have a lot of Asian friends (you know, the downtrodden victims of all this) who think in much the same way. They would far sooner have skipped the entire Communist thing and negotiated peaceful independence with the Europeans, who were on their way out anyway (plantation agriculture having long passed its peak as a money machine). Then the Pacific century would have begun at least 50 years sooner. (sorry, wandering well OT here)

Turk Westerling? Celebes was a mess; the Japanese murdered all the Muslim datus they could find for not being servile enough to them, and that made it very hard for the Dutch to find local conservative leaders to offset the revolutionaries postwar, unlike the British alliance with the the Malay sultans against the (mainly Chinese) CPM. I have a lot of Oostindischer-descended friends and have spent a fair amount of time working in the archipelago. Other than Java and Sumatra, coastals and flatlanders are Muslim, but the upland tribes (headhunters) are Christian (ex-animists, missionaries got to them). Christians largely sided with the Dutch, predicting (accurately) that they'd get screwed after Liberation, pancasila notwithstanding. They kept fighting long after independence, largely unnoticed in the West except when a CIA pilot, Anthony Pope, was shot down parachuting guns to them in 1958. In Sulawesi I saw one army memorials to 'heroes' e.g. 120 soldiers wiped out in an ambush on some remote mountain road. Tough people and a tough country to maneuver in, even on foot. Armed resistance only petered out in the 1970s in some spots and even today there's no love lost, especially since the government resettled Javanese Muslims in Christian areas. A lot of the Indonesian islands would shrug off the 'Javanese empire' if they could. A colourful part of the world.

In "Soldaat van Oranje", one of the 4 old schoolfriends volunteers for the Dutch SS and goes East. I shan't spoil it further for those who haven't seen it, good film.

@JasonChas written at length, in this forum and on BGG, on the Panzer Brigades, and what he views as the German cult of the panzer attack. As oldsters here know well, Jason is a genius macro-thinker, but he also tends to contemptuously wave away counterexamples (micro) that don't fit his Macro thesis. Nonetheless, there is a great deal worth pondering. For those interested, here are some snips: 1. The Germans placed great emphasis on using armor offensively and on concentrating it, and they were the first to understand the need to support it with all arms - motorized to keep up and organic to the PD to ensure effective command and cooperation etc. However, very few men on the German side fully understood the technical details of how and why they had been so successful in the early war period, from 1939 to 1941.... Early in the war achieving an initial break-in was a more important thing to achieve, because the defenders against it mostly didn't know what to do about it. But the Germans did not ascribe those earlier successes to the Allies being dumb at the time. They ascribed them to their own doctrines and what they thought of as the power of the offensive. 2. As a result, they had an extremely offensive minded doctrine about the use of armor. Armor attacked, that was its essence. Letting the enemy attack first and then counterpunching was needlessly forfeiting initiative to enemies whose armies were still viewed (in some respects, rightly) as unadaptive and rigid, and therefore brittle. They believed mass employment in multiple-corps level attacks was the only possible way to employ serious armor. So whenever they accumulated any to speak of, they attempted another such attack. Later in the war the offensive emphasis became a terrible liability. The German armor doctrine had worked in 1940 and in 1942, and they didn't adapt well to it no longer working. They were forever throwing away their magnificent armor on useless counterattacks because they did not have a defensive armor doctrine. By the time a PD was allowed to defend tactically speaking, it often had half or less of its tanks remaining. The higher ups snapped up any armor at all fresh and not immediately in the line, for counterattack schemes. The right place for them would have been just off the line in local reserve, ready for action in any direction, linebacker style. But putting a PD in reserve off the line was an engraved invitation to have it transfered out of your command to somebody else. It was a big ad saying "not needed to hold the front, immediately". It was a general disease - have armor -> attack -> lose armor -> defend. The Germans should have husbanded their uber armor and used it as linebackers, smashing the most forward Allied probes. But defending with armor was simply a heresy. Armor attacked. That was its reason to exist. 3. The 1944 Panzer brigades were the latest and worst example of the armor offensive disease. Worst, because at least a rebuilt PD retained experienced cadres and had all arms in the right proportions. Panzer commanders recommended using new tanks to refit existing Panzer divisions, to get their cadres, experienced staffs, and all make use of their remaining all arms support. But OKW overruled that,and made new KG sized formations instead, out of green men. Hitler wanted more armor formations on the map, psychologically, perhaps. But more likely, they wanted to control the commitment of the new armor, and in particular to ensure it got offensive missions. The Panzer brigades had cadres, certainly, but they performed absymally, and a large part of that has to be put down to green formations. The men hadn't worked together, and a lot of the rank and file were raw. They also tended to get committed piecemeal, and as I have stressed here, on overly offensive missions. Until wrecked - remnants were allowed to defend but not the full strength formations. In the September 1944 Arracourt battles in Lorraine, Hitler thought he was pulling a repetition of Manstein's famous "backhand blow" in the Kharkov counterattack, early 1943. OKW thought the Americans were as logistically overextended after grabbing France. Which was largely true, in the gasoline area at any rate. But the US army wasn't a horsedrawn affair. Panthers charged every morning in fog, to avoid Allied air power. The result was a series of knife fights at 200m, which the US won hands down. They were more often in their own defensive zone, better visibility, TDs heard the Panthers coming, Shermans flanked them, etc. They still managed to get initial break-ins easily enough, even against later Allied defenses. The problems they encountered typically had to do with breakdown of combined arms when infantry got stripped off the tanks by artillery, or getting lost in a deep defended zone and hunted by reserves while buttoned, or having roads cut, mined, bridges blown, etc. Thrust forward with a whole battalion of Panthers at once, down 2-3 roads a company on each, and what happens? Do you get through the front line battalion? Sure. So what? Now you are in bazooka land. You can't drive through an enemy army without showing side plate. Every hedge and wood needs to be scoured by Panzergrenadiers, but they are being blasted by American 105s and 155s. The Allies could "countermass" with artillery fire on the narrow breakthrough areas. Allied fire support and fire responsiveness increased drastically from early war to late. The German infantry could not 'shoulder' through the holes to widen them. Once the tanks were stripped, they were hunted rather than hunters. 4. Did the German command learn from this fiasco? No. The commander of a storied PD who fought his whole army out of the trap of the south of France took control of the remnants of a shattered Panzer brigade, a fresher one that hadn't done well the last few days, cadre from another PD, and his own PD with a reduced number of runners. For days he battered away at a US combat command, trading Panthers for Shermans and not getting even 1 to 1. He was clever about arty and night infantry attacks helping out, to keep it up as long as he had. But he was down to 30 runners, having used up essentially all the armor in the whole theater. So he called off his attacks - and was promptly reprimanded for showing insufficient offensive spirit! Not by some political brown nose at OKW, but by a picked old Prussian Rundstedt protege. With the armor the Germans sent to Lorraine, fully re-equipping the crack 11th Panzer division, the 21st PD, giving 17th SS one panzer battalion, likewise for 3rd and 15th Panzer grenadier, plus TDs or StuGs for all of the above as well, and all of them employed defensively, the PDs as monster backs and the Pz Gdrs as sinew behind river lines and between the woods and cities held by the infantry - you could have fought 3rd army to a standstill, while keeping that massive force intact. Instead they attacked and attacked throughout September until there was nothing left. **** More from Jason on 'Panzerleute disease', for those interested: The question they should have been asking was: where and when am I going to destroy his armor? Because then, it is obvious enough a kill sack or Pakfront in your own zone is a more promising location for it, than off in his. If instead you are trying to win the whole campaign 1940 style without having to face his armor, you try to hit where it isn't. Expecting to paralyze, pocket and kill whole armies again, as in the glory days. Well, that didn't happen and it wasn't going to happen. Offensive spirit did not produce those successes. Enemy weaknesses and mistakes did. The Allies weren't that dumb anymore. You couldn't beat them without fighting them, you had to kill them by fighting them. In particular their armor. And that requires a different way of thinking about what armor can do for you, to consider it the "heavy wood" in a frankly attritionist battle of material, rather than thinking of it as exploiting cavalry that was going to make the enemy 'evaporate' by driving around him and shooting up his supply lines. German defensive armor 'doctrine', such as it was, was the net outcome of a lot of (often superb) tactical skills applied, improvising with whatever remained on hand after the counterattacks bled out. That was all twice as hard and half as effective as it might have been, since the German armor was already decimated at lower exchange ratios than it could have achieved.

"Oo d'you 'fink you are, the Lone Rainger?" (...flash little twerp!) The Buggles! OK, this is late 80s, but the bass bops along ...and I never saw it coming / only saw it fade away

For your further listening pleasure, JD in their classic punk and pop phase: "You think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?" (The life of a CM modder's always intense!) And B52s is always great video arcade brain chewing gum.... ...And while we're diving down the New Wave teen synthpop rabbit hole (this was my younger sisters' playlist not mine at the time, but it grew on me...)

Jungle/dense forest fighting works as well as any other CM infantry fight, guys. It has its own unique and interesting tactical challenges. It's really no more (or less) of a micro hassle than fighting urban scenarios -- easier in a way since you don't have multiple building levels to deal with. And the tree toggle is handy. The main problem with the current game engine in modeling this kind of fighting is that it *massively* undermodels concealment (targets are wayyyyy too easy to spot), and even the densest vegetation types are still way too easy to see through. To offset this in my Makin scenario, I made extensive use of gapped low bocage segments which truncate LOS and allow lots of sneak and peek. It's also important to use Green troops on the US side, to reflect the exhaustion that rapidly sets in, requiring commitment of fresh forces.

There are probably many ways to design for this effect, but yes: a capable sniper ought to be a major pain in the arse to spot and winkle out, capable of forcing an entire platoon to ground and holding up an advance, as happened/happens a LOT in RL, especially in urban warfare or bocage/woodland warfare. Not simply spotted and plugged after his first couple of shots, as is common in game.

Yes, snipers are spotted and die too easily. Part of why I want a generic 'camouflage' cover that provides (invisible) Smoke like cover to units until they move or fire (exempting single shots). In CMSF1 scenarios, I used to colocate a Spy with the Uncon Sniper (solo) to retrieve and use his rifle after rendering Buddy Aid when he quickly bought it. Alas, BFC stopped Spies retrieving weapons in SF2, no idea why.

Come now, you must look past the indifference to modern dentistry and the compulsion to boil all flavour and nutrients out of food, to see the lush and glowing beauty. The Centurion didn't quite make it to WW2 combat, but that one Saxy tank, Lesstenant!

Ex-TER-mi-NATE!!!!!!!!

Beauty is only turret ring deep, but ugly cuts to the mantlet. The entire KV series is beaten senseless with an ugly stick. Same with the Churchill line; it looks like it ought to be amphibious, but isn't. Seems like they could have built 2 tanks with all that extra hull or sumfink. For ugly German tanks (ungainly SP artillery like the sIG38 aside), you'd need to go back to War 1. Although the Hetzer is kind of the Tyrion Lannester of the JgdPz series. Lovably ugly, kind of like a pug: the M3 Stuart/Honey. I also rather like the Cromwell, very steampunk with those rivets. And the Valentine. I like the lines on the M24 Chafee, and have actually sat inside one (unit "Bazeilles", I believe) on the Dien Bien Phu battlefied. Also my personal pick for which WWII tank would I fight in.....

One of the best "Haunted Tank" issues ever, the epic duel between Jeb Stuart and General Priess.... Cliffhanger.....

Well, isn't the thread topic the entire point of the Girl und Panzer anime series?

Yeah, those Ottawa skate commuters really book along! ... And Ontario had even bigger plans, back in the day! Linky

OK, this thread is now thoroughly unmoored and drifting helplessly on the currents of free association. Don't miss the jitterbugging!

I thought he and Snoopy hung out at Bill Mauldin's?

Next thing you'll be telling me that D-Day wasn't the most decisive battle of WW2. ....Anyway, didn't some Americans and early Shermans fight in Third Alamein? So our dear old comrade Vergeltungstenllungenwaffendopfelpflussferdschragemusikgericht is likely in the right of it, not that that should stop us taking the hvss.

Agreed, light mortars are pretty much the only organic weapon Commonwealth rifle companies have to neutralize German MG nests. Trying to flank and storm them merely gets a lot of pixeltommies killed. GIs can at least hope to suppress using their M1s and BARs. That all reflects the documented history. I have noticed while watching (CMBN) playtests on the AI controlled side, on-map mortars firing indirect have a lot quicker response time than do off-map ones. Which seems sensible.

...Plus mounting a big whackin' cannon on top is about the only way to get foreign buyers to touch a GM product, lol. "What's good for General Motors is a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶f̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ good for America." /politics We are heroes of the homeland, American remains....

Be interested to hear what the pros on the board think, but I'd bet money that this cheap and cheerful system is for export. ...I mean, since 1989 has the US Army ever faced robust radar-directed counterbattery fire from a near-peer army, where it needed to keep its tubes flitting around for survival? As opposed to digging in, calling for air and outshooting the enemy first, in the Uncle Sam way? Is there a serious expectation of that threat arising in the future? Towed 105s, dug into a firebase well-stocked with shells, remain the best solution for breaking up enemy concentrations in a battalion or regiment AO. They put a boatload of low cost HE on target quickly, and way outrange guerrilla mortars and Katyusha/Grad type rockets. And on crap mountain roads, towed tubes can get more places than SP can. Plus the Hummer can be an ammo carrier. So I'd guess the export markets for this system would be India and Vietnam? perhaps some of the Eastern Europeans? Taiwan can afford higher tech like MLRS, which makes more sense anyway for the short, intense 'all or nothing' war they'd fight. Large medium tech armies with an unfriendly neighbour who aren't keen on Chinese or Russian kit (probably because they ARE the unfriendly neighbour) and will buy American kit in spite of the higher costs, especially if Uncle Sam subsidizes it. IIRC, back in the day when I still read Janes, it was the French-Italians and South Africans who dominated the tube artillery 'marketplace'. And then Chinese knockoffs drove them out, as with everything else. Until China became The Enemy again after 2016. FWIW, I don't claim to be infallible on this stuff.