LongLeftFlank

Well, I am shamefaced to confess that, in violation of my sacred vows to CMBN before God, I have been wantonly flirting of late with the Vassal version of AH 'The Longest Day', which is at a scale where the above kind of strategic question is more relevant.

On this item, I regret I remain unconvinced. Nigel Hamilton being a bit controversial himself, we'd need to consult the primary sources. However, this American historian seems to have done so: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/11/books/the-ally-we-loved-to-hate.html Mr. Hamilton's version denies that a large-scale British offensive seeking the rupture of the German lines on the eastern flank was ever contemplated. Unfortunately, the effort to confirm Montgomery's mastery of the battlefield through this argument does not square with the evidence. I have examined planning documents originating in Montgomery's own 21 Army Group headquarters that assigned the breakout role to the British and only a secondary mission of flank protection to the Americans. And Carlo d'Este's recent ''Decision in Normandy'' thoroughly demolishes the claim that such a plan was consistently followed. Haven't read d'Este, but perhaps others have?

http://history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply. Right you are, milord.

Merci bien for the on the ground perspective! And yes, I too am trying to be fair to Montgomery. To the Lord Protector: I don't own Hastings, but I dipped into Wilmot (I may own the only extant copy in the Philippines, now a bit mildewed). Ch 18: In April 1944, Montgomery wrote that British Second Army's initial role was to "protect the eastern flank of First US Army.... In its subsequent operations, the Second Army will pivot on its left and offer a strong front against enemy movement towards the lodgement area from the east". But its stated objectives were to shield the US opening up of the ports, and the subsequent build up. There's no mention of diverting the panzers, at least not before D-day. Morgan of COSSAC (backed by Ike and Tedder) denounced this, plus his 'shortening of the [phase] lines' east as too timid. From which Wilmot seems to conclude that the pressure to take Caen on D-day and later, at any cost, emanated from SHAEF, not Monty or his amazing technicolour ego. But there's no evidence I am aware of that, pre-landing, Monty expected the decisive stroke to occur to the west. And not being at the center of that Waterloo event doesn't seem consistent with the man. (So heck, maybe I'm just answering my own question). Again, in the absence of a document, it seems more likely to me that the Allied commanders, especially Monty, expected to subject Rommel/Group West to a bigger, badder reprise of Second Alamein, with carpet bombing. Time and place tbd, but the good tank country around Falaise seems sensible. The Allies (plus LeClerc) could then stroll through the wreck and roll for Paris. Even pre-Bagration, the Russians had already shown that the heavy 'straight punch' worked well against the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, as you all know, grand flanking operations are tricky beasts to plan in advance, as they tend to depend on the enemy's dispositions (witness Moltke the younger. Or Anzio). So anyway, I'm having difficulty believing Monty or anyone had the foresight in April to say hey, a 300 mile end run sweep through the Loire Valley in late June is just the thing for our mainly unblooded American allies.

Since this thread is already a bag of cats, I'll toss in a 'what if' history question: 1. Was it a foregone conclusion that the British should take the left flank of the Normandy lodgement (the traditional BEF position, next to the Channel), leaving the Americans on the right? Any ideas why? 2. Was there a case to be made for reversing the roles? Let the British and Canadians systematically clear Cherbourg and the Brittany ports* with their heavy guns, naval support and 'Funnies'. Meanwhile, the US First and Third Armies take the 'Colossal Crack' to break Rommel's panzer troops in a decisive battle in the good tank country between Caen and Falaise. Note that nobody went into Normandy expecting that the breakout would end up being a wide right hook (COBRA); that idea was only tabled later, as flanking operations usually are, in light of events.** Reversing the sectors, of course, would put the 82nd Airborne at Pegasus and the Big Red One against Hitlerjugend. While both British para divisions drop in the flood zones around Carentan. And, oh dear! my poor uncles in the North Shores wind up on bloody Omaha Note also that I'm not suggesting Bradley would have fared any better than Dempsey against the pakfronts of Caen in June. And I'm not Monty-bashing either, just interested in why they made this decision. Keegan doesn't mention it. * in which case my BFC handle would now be "@LongRightFlank" ** please don't Wiki at me unless you're also ready to discuss its source material. Yes, Bradley suggested in his memoirs that he and Ike planned a hook through the Loire valley all along, as did Monty (per Wilmot), but those hindsight claims should be taken with a big grain of salt unless there's pre-OVERLORD documentation to that effect.

onntXB7qRts

This is brilliant news, if true. I've never liked that you could sit at a distance and shoot men out of hard cover. It may lead me to finally acquire CMSF2, although work hasn't allowed me any gaming time in many months.

Like the old bar sign says: liquor in the front, poker in the rear.

Just don't put BFC's IP in the hands of some private equity smartass who promptly decides this community is too old and 'nichey' to be worth investing in and kills the whole thing. I mean, not without a nine figure payout anyway.

Sonny Boy Williamson - Bring Another Half a Pint (there's some kind of foliage back there)

Interesting offroad tires on the ammo carrier (?) there.

Ah ha, just as expected, the Lord Protector is now caught in a subtle schoolmanly dodge! worthy of his august grandsire (who looks strangely like Rumpole of the Bailey, but isn't so nice). THE ARGUMENT 1. You didn't explicitly say the images had to be still photos. And is not a film, by definition, really just a collection of still images? 2. You haven't debarred newsreel stills, nor recoloured photos, nor heavily staged non-combat shots (e.g. the OP photo is clearly some REMFers tough guying over a kid someone else killed). 3. So now we reach the crux of my Clever Knot: in the pre-CGI 1970s where hand-drawn animation was prohibitively costly, iconoclastic director Ralph Bakshi* made extensive use of rotoscoping, the (often garish) overdrawing and recolouring of live film footage to create animations. A good deal of the combat sequence above is recoloured period newsreel. 3. Trees (albeit leafless) appear repeatedly with the GIs, e.g. 0:08, 0:13, 0:21 (Sing, Sing, Sing), 1:23 (As Time Goes By), 3:10 (Lili Marlene -- well, it looks like some kind of vine or potted plant above the piano anyway if you squint) 4. This entire sequence is clearly the Metz-Aachen period (dragons teeth being a dead giveaway), ergo legit for CMBN. 5. If you declare this is all mere cant and sophistry, and gives you a headache so please shut up, you are clearly also against transgender people peeing in whatever lavatories they please, and therefore a horrid person subject to being canceled, and also having your corpse defaced. Oh, wait.... 6. Being a bottom feeder, and not a proud man, I also claim a fractional credit for putting you on to Lucille Bogan. * btw, also the source of my own avatar, which looks nothing whatsoever like me

OK, totally pushing all boundaries and loopholes here, but desperate times demand desperate measures, and the truth must be attended by a bodyguard of lies! 1. Sing, Sing, Sing by Lou Prima 2. As Time Goes By, by Herman Hupfeld 3. Lili Marlene, by Norbert Schultze

Hmm, Puritans aren't keen on participation trophies, are they? All those sumptuary laws and whatnot. Bugger....

Lucille Bogan, 'Til the Cows Come Home' (1935). I didn't provide a link to the song, whose lyrics are extremely NSFW.

Shameless self-plug

For me, ditto on the above: there's really no point in tactical wargames in the era of CM. The only hex and counter games I play any more are operational command level: VG's Vietnam 1965-1975 and AH 1776 (which I actually pulled out and played solo a few months back). Everything else is multiplayer strategy games which non wargamers can be occasionally talked into playing socially: AH Amoeba Wars, KingMaker, Diplomacy, and the TSR classic Divine Right. All my tactical games are in the attic.

How Not to be Seen Mr. Neasbitt has learned the first lesson in How Not to be Seen.... This will definitely take its place in my CMBN mod set, fantastic!

Ha, and here is JasonC in classic form over at BGG, "racking and stacking" a thesis on the Roman debacle at Cannae.

Erich Koch et al. slapping the bread and salt out of villagers' hands didn't help, certainly. But once Soviet authority was removed, all kinds of local warlords and opportunists were going to pop up to fill the vacuum, no matter how enlightened the Germans chose to be. The Reichskommissars had their orders to squeeze the Ostland dry, and were too racist and ignorant to understand that they needed to cut deals with a subset of these folks and play them off against each other, instead of treating them like dimwitted cattle (stűcke). But Nazis gonna Nazi....

But that kind of very 'micro' technical topic is actually where "His JasonC" was at his weakest, and often made enemies here when challenged by insisting his Word be taken on faith, usually without troubling to cite sources. He has a extraordinary macroeconomic mind (Chicago school, works in very big brain OR), and so he was at his best in macro 'rack and stack' types of evaluations of men against fire over time, IMHO. Hence, tactics, operations and strategy. And at no time did I ever get a sense of him regurgitating Osprey books.

Par for the course in irregular warfare, right up to the present day! And frankly, it's the norm for most regular armies as well. Kelly's Heroes and Major Minderbinder aren't entirely fictional.

Yes, @JasonC left here of his own volition around 2015. He still posts regularly on a variety of boardgames and historical topics over at BGG. I don't recall him citing Zaloga much, but a great deal of Glantz. I got a lot of value from his stuff personally, although I've been at the pointy end of his lovable manner too. But then, I'm also married to a know-it-all, so that all doesn't bother me so much.

Yup, pretty much the same reason I haven't bought CMSF2 or anything else new. I'd be deeply depressed trying to replay JOKER THREE with Marines constantly Keystone Kopsing around the complex streetscapes of Ramadi. When fellow realism junkies like @RockinHarry or @Kaunitz say it's safe to break 3.0 quarantine, I will. Not before then. Men under fire, even panicked, should get their arses down and stay put *by default*, unless they're in the middle of a runway or something. I'd sooner see them 'grow' some microterrain not previously rendered, or even sink into the terrain mesh to reflect just how good humans are at at putting hard objects between themselves and incoming hot metal.

Wow @Aquila-SmartWargames, I just watched your video end to end! Many thanks for making it, I enjoyed it very much and learned a lot from you. The 1943 Makin landing was very well documented (by SLA Marshall, no less!), and most of those bunker lines you had to slog through were in their historical locations. And it sounds like you encountered all the frustrations of a real life BLT commander, especially inability to access your plentiful-on-paper support firepower once ashore. The original design was that most of those ships and aircraft plastered the map in the first 5 minutes without player involvement, but perhaps the updates to CMBN since 2012 altered the logic, or did you make a change? TRPs would definitely have been totally ahistorical, though convenient gamewise. The Navy had to be very careful with the bombardment and even then there were numerous friendly fire casualties. Shore to ship fire coordination by radio was simply infeasible in timelines less than a day in late '43. And it was an extreme rarity in the PTO that an Allied force had the luxury of standing off and letting big guns pulverize the enemy; invariably the bulk of the Japanese were still in their holes once the smoke cleared, still needing to be cleared out the hard way (you know this all, I'm sure). As you noticed too, jungle warfare is extremely fragmented, a series of lethal 3 on 1 hide-and-seeks, down and dirty. In a big scenario that presents a CM micro nightmare. I personally don't play above company level in RT and it sounds like you're the same. But with WeGo it is quite manageable, albeit lengthy. It would have been hard to hack this action up into small chunks without losing a lot of the wargame command decision element. I respect that's not your priority though; fair enough. Some of the other annoyances you mentioned are also historical, and deliberate. Just as in the real landing, the platoons landed all mixed up all along the beach, having got hung up on the reef, so you need to sort them out prior to moving inland. (Platoon movement (Hunt, usually) helps a lot with speeding up the issue of orders). Those snipers out in the water on the wrecked hulks (bridges) were a very real irritant; their fire held up the main landing force for an hour (!) while a US destroyer sailed in close and pulverized them! I was smiling as they popped up again and again. I notice you largely used only one speed: Quick, which caused your guys to take a lot of extra casualties. And you also pushed the same Green squads forward again and again without letup until they broke. So, they panic, hair-on-fire: the engine 4.0 issues compound that problem of course. That's why you really need a whole battalion to clear this map (that's in the briefing, which I will admit runs on far too long). Only a subset of formations are in action at any given moment. Were I ever to redo this scenario (unlikely), I'd make the tanks a lot less powerful. You had them flitting all over the map, which is skilled gaming, but pretty ahistorical. Again, just as in Vietnam there was no high tech magic bullet to PTO jungle warfare; just filthy, dehydrated young men scrambling through dense thickets with rifles and grenades. Anyway, thanks again for taking it for a spin, and for the excellent video!