Stalin's Organ

I'm not a fan of the 88. It traverse's painfully slowly, so it simply cannot take on 2 targets if both of them can shoot at it - eg 2 shermans 90 degrees appart will kill it - sure they'll lose a Sherman, but you could have got that with a 75 for a lot fewer points! And for the money you pay for the 88 this is a huge problem - yuo need them to cover big arcs. Personally as Germans I prefer 50mm's (cheap, traverse quickly, occasionally get T) and Puppchen (can kill anything, and even cheaper!) 57's are great for the allies, 17 pdrs and 76's are good, but you're usually attacking or in a ME and big heavy guns that take several minutes to unlimber aren't that much use. Plus the SP versions (M-10, Achilles, Firefly, M4-76) are pretty cheap, mobile and better value.

2/3rds the way through game 4 - yet another "interesting" scenario! But it's not the same as a "real" campaign a la Steel Panthers or similar. The progression of experience in hte "core" unit is simply not of any intterest - it's got nothing to do with what I do - squads that are decimated come back better than new, while preserving a platoon might have no effect 'cos the atory line gives it a green squad of replacements next game. Still they're great scenarios for a small force.

Yes it is possible - you get close enough and wait....and wait..and lots of them might die....and wait...and you might kill the vehicle!! Satchel charges are used automatically whenever appropriate. This includes close assaults on any enemy - infantry, armour, bunkers. Also engineers use them to clear minefields. It's all automatic - you don't have to select them or anything.

Just finished the 3rd scenario - 65 major victory. The direct fire HE is a must, as is picking the right spot to attack - a tough fight - all those bloody airbrone MG's are a pain!

By the middle of the war, say the end of 43, every Russian tank had a radio, so command and control problems were not as bad as at thestart of hte war. Western perceptions of Russian tactics as unsophisticated are mostly myth. The Russians were no more eager to die than anyone else.

In the first scenario I rushed h/t's full of inf up to the wood just below the furthest hill and hid there for about 15 turns while the Brits were shot to bits by 251 MG's and mortars. A platoon ran to the nearest hill almost as quickly as the h/t's got their troops into position. and it and the 3rd platoon hid in the woods that the road runs through, ambushing the occasional squad that tried to move through there. Really the exposed nature of hte furthest hill was devastating for the Brits - I could shoot it up from almost anywhere on hte map, while they couldn't get enough on top to allow them to win the firefight - well there wasn't a firefight 'cos I shot them to bits with light armour from outside PIAT range! By the time I sent in the infantry it was a walkover.

91 in game 1, and 76 in game 2 - the Poles took the right end of the bridge for a while, but the Stuh took out the last Sherman had on with it's first shot, and it and the a/c that arrived with hte convoy decimated the Polish infantry at the objective overlooking the exit point - Polish surrender on T32. The best bit was the Polish attack by infantry only down the right hand side of the river - it was only defended by a MG42 and a HQ. A couple of H/T's came up a bit later, making a classic infantry rush vs MG's, but 3 MG's just ain't enough! The 20mm flak had 3 AP ammo left - it was on the other side of the road from the objective over the exit point and had an exciting time with hte infantry on the opposite hill 50 yards away! Both Pz-4's were knocked out by Jabo's, but the 75mm Pak's wiped up the Polish armour just nicely!! The Poles made it into the town with a few infantry and a couple of H/T's, but they were all wiped by 2 platoons of mine in htere, albeit at some cost in casualties. All the Allied arty went after 1 75mm pak, finally killing it on the last turn - the ground around it was like a moonscape! Excellent game...especially 'cos I won!! [ 05-26-2001: Message edited by: Stalin's Organ ]

Fair enough - a nice reasoned post, unlike your previous effort!

Ahh...Pvt Ryan - good to see you put as much thought into your post as most of hte others in the thread!! lol

Thanks Jason & Mathew - I don't think you're wasting your time Stalin (also Mike the Bike)

Johnny you are way, way to simple with your analysis. Sure Pz3's and 4's defeated T34's sometimes - but in 1941 they usually got their arse whipped before doing a bit of outflanking, or bringing in the big guns or destroying the accompanying lighter tanks, etc. Lots of people didn't run away when push camt to shove - for example when the Italians first encountered the Matilda 2 they didn't surrender - they attacked them with submachine guns and hand grenades! Not quite the picture we've been bought up on of the Italians is it?? The main reason large numbers of Russians surrendered had little to do with proaganda - they were generally surrounded and out of supplies. Russians never thought the Germans were invincible, and generally fought on as long as there was some chace, as soldiers of all nations did. You shouldn't believe everything you read!

I used one briefly in hte NZ army as a rifleman, but don't have any strong memories of it othe than it was easy to strip and reassemble - they managed to teach us how to do that blindfolded in about an hour - but we only used it on the range for a couple of days. I've no idea why!!

Is for god-damned huge bunches of f-ing reinforcements to arrive organised into platoons and companies rather than bloody great blobs that take 20 minutes or more to sort out!! Grrr.......I'm almost through sorting out the US inf battalion reinforcement in "We fight or die here", let alone deployed it!!

Thanks Simon. Olle - sorry - I forgot to look it up today at work - hopefully I'll remember tomorrow. It's being produced by Battlefront Games, who make a range of excellent 15mm WW2 figures and models from Auckland, New Zealand. I never played Command Decision.

von Lucke I think you'll find far fewer accounts of Japanese actually fighting to the last man than you think. Often they just died as huddled masses in the bottom of bunkers - sure they refused to surrender, but often they had long since stopped actually fighting. Many also committed suicide rather than surrender - again they did not actually _fight_ to the last man. Even the infamous "banzai" charges sometimes involveds trops fairly blindly charging forwards without trying to fight very much.

Yes it was - they couldn't nose over in a dive too hard or the float would stick to the top of hte bowl and cut out hte fuel supply! The problem was with all early marks of hte Merlin, so affected the Hurricane and Defiant too. I did an apprenticeship with the local airline, including time on R1830's and Gipsy Majors - now I work for the local feds!

Gyrene turbos were used quite early on - the P47B had one, and they were fitted to P-38's from 1943. The A-20 (Boston II) had turbochargers, as ordered by France at the start of the war & delivered to the UK, replaced by superchargers on the A20A (BD-1), various marks of the B-24 Liberator had turbo's asa well as superchargers. The P38 ones gave trouble, never heard of any hassles from the P47 ones though. Stalin, also a LAME!

Skipper's probably talking about turbo-charging, wher exhaust gasses are used to drive a turbine that drives a compressor in the inlet. Americans sometimes call thus turbo-supercharging. Supercharging (direct mechanical drive from the engine to the compressor) was absolutely common - the Allison B-1710 originally fited to the Mustang suffered from only having a 1-stage supercharger, whereas the merlin eventually fitted had a 2-stage. The American radial engines might have either super or turbo-charging - eg the P47 had a turbocharger behind the cockpit, while the C47 engines had a supercharger. The Diesel engine fitted to the Ju-86 was unusual in that it had 2 pistons in each cylinder, and a separate crankshaft at each end of hte cylinder - the pistons compressed the charge by moving towards each other, and a gearbox merged the power from the 2 crankshafts. This did away with the need to have a strong, heavy cylinder head for each cylinder and was a major reason why hte engine could be made light enough for aircraft use.

I'm with Abbot on this - Soldiers of all nationalities did what they had to. Yes I CAN imagine almost anyone else wading 700 yds to get to the beaches - what was the alternative? And the Aussies weren't in the Dessert long enough to be feared by anyone - they left to surrender at Singapore. Their poorly trained militia put up a hell of a fight in New Guinea, but were helped by terrain and poor Jap supply and tactics just as the Empire troops had those things agaisnt them in Malaya. New Zealand soldiers were supposedly quite flash, but still mutinied in 1943 and were fought out and over-cautious by late 1944. Audie Murphy was US Infantry - which got the worst recruits and the poorest training of all the US combat arms & stuill managed to do amazing stuff.....

Well if playing Steel Panthers makes one an old timer I'd better get out my Zimmer Frame!! I'd forgotten about that actually, but you're right of course. Dunnee I'm not sure I get your point. A vet might be more likely to piss himself because he may have experience with what's going to come next, whereas a gung-ho recruit might hit hte dirt, not hear anything else so get up and be caught by the FFE barrage after the first couple of ranging shots. I'd like to separate the effects along those lines - the keen recruits would probably take a lot more casualties before going to ground for example - they might get closer and then be unable to retire. The worst possible combo would, of course, be an unenthusiastic militia - incompetant and terrified, while a keen veteran might be a very formidable foe indeed - knows when and where to take cover, is harder to pin, takes fewer casualties, shoots back, etc.

Jason I stil think you're oversimplifying. For example most 88mm guns in the front lines of hte German army in 1944 were not FLAK - they were PAK, and those that were FLAK were infinitely better suited for direct fire than the US 90mm or the Brit 3.7, having better mounts and proper optics and fire control systems for he jobs. And while the benefit of 20/20 hindsight tells us thathte Luftwafee was not a significant tactical threat, the Allies had no way of knowing that at the time - Bodenplatte beign an obvious example of the possibilities that had to be considere. Also sneak raids were still mounted, andthere was celarly a significant fighter presence devoted to defending hte reich, plus the jet-threat had to be considered....

There were 6 versions - the first 3 were apparently not used by the Germans, but had German reporting designations H503®, H503/1®, H503/2®. These 3 had an L22 barrel, the last 3 versions had L25. All used the same ammo except the H503®, which used a slightly lighter shell (98kg vs 100kg for the others). Weight in action of the first 3 was 15,796 kg(H503®) or 15800 for the other 2, with maximum ranges of 12800 and 16000m respectively.

My impressoin of some of the battle-weary Brits in late 44/45 is that htey are exactly high quality (training & experience)/low morale. I asked this because a new set of figure-gaming rules being playtested now uses it and it works pretty well for them IMO

Jason - real armies have many more troops behind hte lines than in the front one, which is why corps and armies have significant AA assets - they're not there to be parcelled out to divisions that might feel they are under an air threat!! A plane moving at 300 mph covers 5 miles a minute (500kmph and 8km/min roughly) - it doesn't see unit boundaries, and it's much more likely to see 5 acres of vehicle park or stored dump than 5 acres of an infantry regiment dug in!!

Oops - never mind, the picture finally appeared!! [ 04-30-2001: Message edited by: Stalin's Organ ]