JasonC
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Posts posted by JasonC
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The PTAB stuff persuaded me to look something up. The Russians dropped 9.4 million of the things from mid 1943 to May 1945. Armor kills with them, um. Still looking for any evidence of --- any.
Initial pilot claims were one kill per 80 dropped. Later that rose to claiming one per 25, half full tanks, half other vehicles. That neatly covers every AFV ever fielded by Germany - four times over. Meanwhile, actual air to ground armor kills with anything... Still need to find any evidence for them, in any numbers.
Kursk specifically, one Elephant and a merely probable on a handful of Panthers - the former by igniting a fuel cell fire incidentally - for 100,000 dropped. Likely other types in proportion, to be fair. Meaning a max upside of perhaps 1% German armor losses.
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Well the 9mm is half the mass of a 45 from the Thompson, but one third more than the lighter 7.62x25 from the PPsH. The latter more than makes up for it with higher muzzle velocity, however. Much flatter trajectory from up to 50% higher MV. Either is pretty controllable, especially in a heavy enough gun. Either is easier to hit with, using short bursts, than single shots from rifles, at 50-75 yards. Take it out to doubke that, and its still better with standing unsupported fire, but the more accurate rifle is passing it in prone or braced, careful shots. Go out to 200 or 300, and the rifke wins, no contest. At those ranges, all the machine pistol rounds are "golfing" - meaning significant drop and holdovers needed with the range estimate just right, while the full rifles are still shooting pretty much flat.
FWIW...
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Sgt Joch - pretty much point blank that. Here is going full cyclic for a 72 round drum -
Elapsed time, 5 seconds.
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"The antitank ditches had to be collapsed by accurate dive bomber attacks before the tanks could pass".
No. Just... no.
Or, the part about new Russian anti-tank bomblets letting each Sturmovik "devastate" a "whole column of armor" 200 meters long.
Got any actual dead tanks killed by the things? One end of the battle to the other? Anyone? Anyone?
Here is a piece of equipment I can look up in a manual. Here is an important muckety muck giving his opinions before he knows anything.
Here is footage of a soldier digging in. Here is made up silliness about shooting the guns off tanks.
Just... no.
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In command. Let them break contact if they can manage it. Don't give them easy hiding spots 5 feet away, but do give them natural, large blocks of cover in which they are maneuvering when the firefight happens. The goal is a natural fight of the sort that could arise readily in a real CM game. If you are trying to force a bunch of things to happen just this way, you are doing it wrong.
As for the number of possible combinations, a representative mix will suffice. Having every combination in your 72, and a sample size worth of each, would indeed help to measure the size of effect of different factors. But just to get the ballpark range of best and worst cases, and a few intermediate ones, would already let us see the range of achieved accuracies likely to be seen in practice. Which is all we need to gauge whether all of them as systematically too high. You do need some spread - just knowing that 3 SMG squads into a wheatfield at 50 yards are pretty deadly wouldn't tell us very much.
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Definitely not boring. Realism is good. Modest size is very good.
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Several questions... First to Doug.
Don't use "fast'. Running troops are very vulnerable, and the problem is not one of minimizing exposure time. Fast should only be used in your own "backfield", to reposition a reserve inside a friendly town, for example, or to route-march down a road out of LOS of the enemy until you near a jumping off point - with friendlies ahead to ensure there is nothing enemy along the route.
The normal move order for advancing troops is "quick", in short dashes, which they can complete in a minute or less. Before firing starts you can even use "move to contact", to have them all stop and get down as soon as fire is opened. Inside woods or similar cover, and for heavy weapons teams that can't keep up "quick" without becoming exhausted, just use "move". But don't use that command (or "fast") once under fire. If they can't "quick" they should probably not be moving at all, but sometimes "slow" to crawl 20 meters to cover may be necessary. While under fire already, mind.
The big mental adjustment is to just completely drop the idea that the problem is one of movement in the first place. You aren't trying to get somewhere. You are trying to keep the company alive and in good order, and presenting firepower to the enemy. The only reason you are moving is (1) you don't have spots yet and (2) infantry firepower is higher at closer range. If you don't have fire superiority in small arms terms, you emphatically would not want to close - you would just be driving up enemy firepower faster than your own. Only if reason (2) is going to operate in your favor by a large amount does reducing the range benefit you. Because you are not trying to solve a problem of movement or get anywhere. You are trying to win a war of attrition by killing the enemy, preferably before he kills you.
The biggest reason to walk towards him, therefore, is (1). If you don't have any targets where you are, either you are expecting a change on the enemy side to give you some presently (whether from a movement of his, or from hiding guys coming off hide to fire, or similar), or you have to move to get to locations that can see enemies.
Next, do you prep fire at a merely suspected treeline? If you have artillery fire support to burn and not a lot of time, you can fire at likely enemy positions directly along your planned path of advance, and follow that barrage as it walks along your route. But usually you won't have enough fire support for this. Indirect FOs are commonly put on only the single most likely enemy held position, either the objective or a point with good cover near the clearly most important route to the objective. There needs to be a very high chance of a significant number of enemy under the barrage footprint to justify firing off a full module of ammo at a map reference, with no known target.
Otherwise, you can have an FO of a "reactive" artillery module call for fire on such a treeline and have the minutes counting down, while you advance. If you don't find enemy, then you adjust the aim point of the barrage farther on. You hold the barrage in readiness, in other words, a few minutes out, ahead of the advance. As soon as the enemy threat becomes actual, you just stop adjusting (or make one final, adaptive adjustment to where the enemy is thickest) and let it count the rest of the way down and land on him.
Faster response comes from the on map HE weapons - the 82mm mortars, SU-76s, T-34s. They don't "area fire" without a target. They get LOS to that suspected treeline before your infantry steps out. They are "overwatch", you only advance the infantry at positions your overwatch can see. When the infantry reach a body of cover, they clear it of any enemy and check it and occupy its forward positions and look out at whatever they can see. Then the overwatch displaces forward to that body of cover, or to peek around it, at the next LOS blockage. When the overwatch is in place again, the infantry steps out again - not before.
Note, this is not a matter of the overwatch HE shooters helping the infantry move. The infantry is clearing LOS blockages the HE shooters can't see through. If you could already see the enemy and he couldn't evade or get away by ducking, you'd sit right where you are and casually murder them all with HE fire, from range. It is only because the enemy is hiding or behind LOS blockages that anybody needs to advance in the first place. Then the threat of your infantry walking right over them forces them to reveal themselves and fire. If they don't, then your infantry finds them anyway, at a point blank range with maximum firepower etc.
You say the trickiest thing is what to do with the infantry heavy weapons. They are like the HE shooters above - overwatch, and the 82mm mortars in particular are the most important weapons in the whole battalion. HMG teams, ATRs, and snipers are also part of the overwatch element, along with the mortars, FOs, supporting armor. The difference with the infantry heavy weapons is just that they are cover-loving like the squad infantry, rather than cover-blocked like armor.
That just means the normal place for the infantry heavy weapons is the last place the squad infantry just cleared. Squads check out that woods, no enemy. OK, so the HMG and mortar can set up there. What can they see from there? Well, why did you pick it as a place to reach and clear, if it couldn't see stuff that mattered to the next step of your planned advance? An avenue of advance is, precisely, a sequence of cover positions each of which covers the move to the next one, by having observation of that next step in the chain.
If the range to the next little step is 80 yards, no you don't need to fetch up your 82mm mortars. At that range, the infantry squads are their own cover fire. But at 300 or 400 yards, their rifles and LMGs aren't going to do diddly; the infantry heavy weapons need to come up and cover that move, instead.
Of course defenders try to separate you from your overwatch. Meaning, pick spots that can see your leading infantry, but that every part of your side of the field can't easily see. That's normal. Take all the spots they can't cover that way first, the locations they could only see from that "up" position on the front treeline or a top the hill, or from the forward line of buildings. Those spots your overwatch *does* sweep, so those are where you head *first*, with the squad infantry.
Once you "own" those, you pick next locations because the squads can cover themselves (short distances, good cover), or you bring up the heavy weapons. So if the enemy is on a reverse slope, first take your own side of that slope. Get squad infantry up into the first cover positions on the slope, to spot what is immediately beyond. Plan your next "move" after you determine all that, with your heavy weapons safely in your dead ground but near the crest, so they can pick whether to engage.
Every move the enemy picks has a counter. If he is "up" and can see everything, then you "counter" with overwatch firepower from range. If he is "back" and hiding and can't see much, you advance to take the ground he thereby ceded to you, and then you pick just a few of him to "overload". He usually can't pick *both* to be hidden and also to have all his weapons bear on any of yours. So you either rely on full overwatch to take on the whole enemy position, or you set up a many on few, then another, and pick your way through only a few of the enemy positions, enough to open a route and dislocate his defense scheme. You don't get to decide which of those approaches to use. The enemy sets up one way or another, and you have to use the appropriate "counter" to his chosen mix of "up" and "back" positions (wide LOS and forward slope each, vs narrow LOS and reverse slope each).
The next point for Doug should go without saying, but don't rush onto the enemy position. Movement doesn't take ground - fire takes ground. You normally clear a position by plastering the enemy on that position and them abandoning it as too hot (or routing away, or dying where they stand) before you send anyone there yourself. Send shells and bullets, not bodies. Only send bodies yourself when there is nothing left by bodies in the other sense of the term, as defenders. OK, occasionally you may "assault" when the remaining defenders are heads down and cowering, but when it doubt, wait and shoot some more. Get someone into cover at grenade range, or at least good SMG range, first. It is usually the 3rd unit that "assaults", while one is taking reply fire and occasionally pinned as a result, and the second is firing back continually and keeping the enemy head's down (and freeing the first to add its fire etc). Never quick or walk at an equal number of enemy shooters - you are just giving them free kills and are not a danger to them at all.
It may help to visualize the later stages of the attack, that you are trying to set up. Every covered position 400 to 500 yards from the enemy with any LOS to any of his positions has MG teams along its forward edge, and HQs spotting for 82mm mortars farther back, hiding behind that cover, and FOs and ATRs and snipers. Every covered position within 200 yards of the enemy has squad infantry lining every forward spot, with rifles and LMGs at the ready, the men rallied, even if a few have been hit and are down etc. Supporting armor is peeking around a few of those (either kind), ready able and willing to toss in direct fire HE at any MG that the forward infantry discover. Then the nearest cover "emits" small teams that "bound" forward at "quick", to any shellhole or house or clump of trees they can find, 75 yards from that enemy. Then 30 yards from that enemy, after any spots at the 75 have "filled up" with teams that made it. Anybody shoots at and stops those teams, the whole company sentences to death by firing squad and executes said sentence immediately. Then another few teams repeat the procedure - as many times as the enemy likes, until they are dead or shut up and go to ground. It only ends when there are squads rallied with SMGs at the ready at 75, and a few grenade throwers get to 30, alive. They throw, and throw a little more, and then enemy has stopped firing. Now someone moves "quick" into the actual cover they used to be firing from. Same procedure if those get shot. Repeat until they don't.
It isn't fast, isn't meant to be, doesn't have to be. There is no panicking. No "oh no, someone is shooting at us, we must DO SOMETHINK!!!"
It is combat, being shot at is normal. The something one does about it is shoot back.
I hope that helps Doug...
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Cavalry did screen ahead of parts of the advance, avoiding heavy engagement and just reporting, enemy outpost here, took fire from there, etc. Not as leaders of an attack column, but well in front of those, and not engaging more than that.
When it came time to engage, if the terrain called for infantry, armored infantry dismounted and went first, with tanks just fire support. If it called for a drive straight down a road, Shermans went first.
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I deny it. The tank battalion commander led the road march north in his own vehicle, though that was out of contact. Then Task Force Ezell, one tank company leading, one armored infantry company, and one battery of Priest was the first to push in to the Bastogne perimeter. They were ordered back.
As for the famous attack on the 22nd - which wasn't until 2 days later - by Abrams force, that made the link up with 101 for the final time, the leading element was a Sherman platoon, led by the tank Cobra C-6 specifically. Halftracked armored infantry was the next element. First hand AARs specifically mention the Germans setting off Teller mines for the first halftracks, after four Shermans had already passed. (A barrage went ahead of even the Shermans, incidentally).
An account - http://www.army.mil/article/17393/
Lots of armor battalion first hand accounts attest to the practice of leading with the medium tanks, in platoon or full company strength, not just on that occasion but back to Cobra, Brittany, the race across France, the Lorraine fighting, and in the Bulge. It was SOP.
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Bulletpoint - a company doesn't use platoons as waves, and won't advance them side by side, and certainly won't stop because one squad takes fire.
A company is more like the minimum unit of maneuver for a Russian Rifle style infantry attack. Sure there are SOPs it follows inside and we can talk over those, but the first thing to understand is that a Russian rifle company gets *one* mission, on *one* axis of advance, as *one* wave. Not 3. As for how broad a front that company should advance on is, 400 to 500 meters, tops. If you've only got one company and the frontage is a full kilometer or more, you might have a small patrol to cover the part of the frontage you won't be using, but almost the whole company will advance in the 400-500 meters you are using.
Such a flank patrol might be a single HQ team, a single squad, split, and an ATR. Maybe a second split up squad and a sharpshooter in addition. With like half the battlefield just for them. They are just eyes they pick forward very carefully (a few movers at a time, max) and stay in cover etc. They can't attack anything and can't really even defend anything, but they will see it coming and give a bit of warning if the enemy leaves his positions on that part of the field trying to flank the main company attack. I am just explaining what I mean by a flank patrol, understand. Better is if the next unit over provides such flank security, but beggars can't be chosers sometimes. The key thing is *not* to spread out to the full width of the map in an even spread. That just prevents you having the depth anywhere, to fight the Russian rifle formation way.
What is a typical formation for the advancing company, with or without such a slight detachment, in the place where you are actually attacking? A blob. Either a wedge with one platoon up, or a square with two platoons up and two following in their foot steps. One of those could be company weapons or an ad hoc platoon led by the company commander. Each platoon is then, again, in a blob formation, not a single skirmish line. There could be several layers to the company as a result, but those aren't really the "waves" talked about previously, they are all one wave. They are all in mutual supporting distance, a grenade throw or less from each other, similar sight picture from one to the next. You don't want a single artillery shell to take out too many of them, they maintain their interval in that sense. But the whole group is still a continuous cloud, not a thin line.
What do they do if a leading unit takes MG fire from a single shooter 300 meters distant? The single unit fired on hits the deck and avoids fire by crawling to the nearest available cover, more likely back than forward. Everyone else keeps right on going. It is going to take a heck of a lot more than one distant MG to stop the whole company. That's kind of why there is a whole company coming. If the MG shifts its fire to another, the first rallies and gets back up and comes on again. The new group shot at hits the deck and crawls to cover and so forth. Good luck stopping 20 units that way with just 1 shooter. You probably won't have a good "spot" of the firing MG, but since it can't remotely stop you from getting closer and changing that, there isn't much reason to care.
If you do get close enough, it is the company's own heavy weapons that are charged with suppressing isolated, single MGs. If battalion 82mm mortars back at the line of departure can chime in, great, but not strictly necessary. None of this counts as the wave being stopped or calls for any pause to fire at the defense with major fire support.
If, instead, we are talking about the entire leading edge of the company coming under fire, and shells falling as well, and half a dozen enemy shooters heard (a full platoon position with HMG supplements or similar), then the company wave may stop and fire back and call for fire support. It uses its unshot elements to reach reasonable cover near where it was first "checked"; it can avoid the fire (everyone prone etc) if it is hot enough and there is going to be fire support help soon. Or it can try to fire back itself and see if it can achieve fire dominance from its own internal resources.
The key thing there is not to press if it isn't working. The problem is not one of movement and it isn't a charge; the company either has the firepower to blow away what has confronted it or it doesn't. If it doesn't, deny closer engagement (cover, prone, short withdrawal etc) and wait for the fire support; the company's mission is to rally in that case, and to hold, ratchet fashion, whatever ground it already covered, that has any terrain worth holding.
The whole battalion is supposed to see that company advance result, and assign fire and direct the next company attack wave based on how it went and what it discovered. Immediately, with no pause in the overall combat. "OK, you showed me that position to check A company, my fire elements will chew on that, thanks. Whatcha got vs B company?" The idea is to induce the defender to reveal himself, to commit his reserves, to show you where his main body is and reveal the whole plan and intention of the defensive scheme. The attack then directs itself at that scheme, in a "hit them where they are", firepower method. It is not a hunt for gaps, but for targets, targets that are then plastered, and assaulted once duly plastered.
For that to work, the waves have to find serious positions, enough to justify major fire allocations to deal with that. That is *why* the waves are substantial in size. It isn't a matter of feeling forward with half squads looking for safe routes or trying to cover ground. The wave is supposed to be heavy enough that it either goes right into or through the enemy, or he reveals real strength to stop it. That strength is they directly smashed, by fire and the next assault. There is nothing subtle about this...
I hope that helps.
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A march formation in a manual isn't a combat doctrine.
US armored task forces in fact led with a medium tank company, as a rule. With a Jumbo on point if they had one. Not with attached cavalry in jeeps or recon anything.
Recon forces mostly got screening and security missions, defense of long flanks to enable other forces to concentrate, and the like. Sometimes they even attacked, but when they did they dismounted and fought like infantry, supported by organic mortars and their assault guns and light tanks - hopefully against a relatively weak, infantry only enemy. And that wasn't a matter of doctrine or fulfilling a planned role, it was just a field expedient when the only unit around was a cavalry battalion or company, and the operations situation required another probe.
The typical tactical formation in a US AD force was a task force, a battalion sized unit created by cross attaching armored infantry companies with tank companies to create an armor heavy or an infantry heavy mix in 2 to 1 ratios. The typical tactical formation in a US ID force was an infantry battalion with attachments, working as part of a regimental combat team that attached tank and TD support, and a portion of the divisional artillery, down to regiment.
Then when a US ID force actually had to attack, it is a battalion assigned the mission, but they don't attack with the whole battalion. They designated one company as assault, another as support, and the remainder as reserve (3rd line plus HQ, weapons, etc). The support has a front line position with observation and in range to support by fire, and gets to hold the frontage if the assault battalion gets shot to pieces, so there isn't a hole in the line as the result of a defeat. It quickly has the same frontage assigned to it as the assault company, just staying at the start line. It also is supposed to move up and relieve the assault company when and if the attack succeeds, to allow that company to reorganize and the like. Either it, or the reserve, then takes the assault role, with the other getting the new support role, while the original assault company rotates into reserve as soon as the local combat conditions permit it.
Thus, a US infantry battalion is expected to attack with just a single company, and at most some mortar and MG fire support at medium range from the rest of the formation.
How the heck is that supposed to work? Answer, they aren't relying on infantry numbers to begin with. It doesn't take a regiment to follow up a barrage. Sending more men wouldn't increase the shells sent, or the number of supporting tanks, or make the ground any better, or surprise the enemy more. All the determinants of the success of these little probes, not pushed too hard individually, were outside of the question of how many men were sent and frankly most of them were beyond the control of the attacking infantry battalion.
Didn't matter, because these nibbles were going on all over the line, and some would succeed, and the accompanying artillery fire would bleed the enemy, and between him bleeding and little wedges being driven into his position and the whole thing being continued day after day, the line would gradually crawl over the enemy and hurt him the while. That's how US infantry divisions fought. The whole system was designed to have another probe ready to go the next day, no matter what. They didn't try to win the war *today*. Meanwhile, every nibbling company could get tank support and an artillery barrage and have the whole "kit bag" in a combined arms sense, and the local commander was expected to use the right tool for each enemy encountered, and carefully pick through them.
The US AD way of fighting, on the other hand, was above all the find a local flank and turn it with a vehicle move. Find fix flank was the standing method of any task force. Terrain and enemy dictated who had which role in that. An armor heavy task force (2 medium tank companies, 1 armored infantry company, smaller attachments of TDs, engineers, cavalry, whatever) would generally do the finding with a tank company, and the fixing with one of the others. The armored infantry could be the flankers if it involved going through woods or a town or over a river, or the fixers if it was just a matter of containing an enemy infantry force and pinning them down. The flanking move could be designed to assault the enemy from a new direction, or to just get behind and "bag" them, expecting to take them prisoner after subjecting them to a prolonged shelling, or it could be a true bypass movement, finding a route that the rest of the task force would follow, leaving only a small screen around the enemy and hauling tail for the next objective.
Both forces tended to think of their problem as one of movement and reaching tactical objectives. The AD way in particular wanted to find a way around and keep going, and fought to get that only if it had to. The ID way assigned near and reachable objectives, expected to clear them and hold them, and then ratchet the whole thing forward, more systematically. They also fought to enable movement more than the other way around, but expected to have to fight more because more things could readily block them.
The emphasis on ground control and rating any mission as successful if a terrain objective was reached, was arguably a pretty dumb way of thinking about combat, but it was the American way in such things. Big bags of prisoners and avoiding complete destruction of one's own formation were about the only other items that ranked. And even the former of those was not much more than gravy, the big thing was to reach the spot on the map the muckety mucks had assigned one to reach, by the hour they called for it to be reached. Stringing those together into a victory was the responsibility of someone with stars on their shoulder, not bars, oak leaves, or birds.
Failure was always an option. Meaning, if the mission looked too hard or losses promised to be too high, they could and did just say "screw this, somebody blew it" and chuck the mission, go to ground, defend what they could. Somebody else can do the job today. Pressing hard and getting a lot of guys killed was considered a disaster and stupidity, not bravery or devotion to duty. With the net result that advantage situations were pushed and disadvantage situations were backed off, though also with a side effect of some lethargy or half heartedness - at least by some other armies' standards in such things.
Just an example of the variety of actual combat practice, in different armies and branches, in the second half of WW II...
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Sgt Joch - no, I don't think "all combatants operated pretty much the same way in 43-45". Even different components of the same army didn't operate the same way.
Telling me they must have because post war (not 43-45) doctrine (not practice) describing march formations and move to contact practices advised engaging with smallest elements first, is a bit like saying, since riflemen in all arms put their rifle to one of their shoulders and aligned the sights before pulling the trigger, clearly they were all fighting the same way in all respects. There are certainly very elementary military actions that there is only one right way to do, and people do them that right way. That doesn't suffice to remove all variation in combat doctrine or practice.
Russian rifle didn't fight like Russian mech. US infantry force probe routines weren't how the British attacked, armor first, in Goodwood. German panzer divisions didn't use a stylized echelon attack scheme the way Russian mech did. Nor did Germans put half their tube artillery and armor at army level for commitment here or there as a division's mission dictated. Russians didn't make regimental teams of all arms by cross attachment of artillery and division assets downward, either in the even slices the US favored or the battalion sized lumps the Germans favored. Germans didn't use armored TD battalions flocking to the wound site as a primary means of anti tank defense, like Americans did. Russians didn't let every 2nd Lt with a radio call in a corps worth of artillery fire if he had a good target, like US and British sometimes did.
They all had different force types, weapon mixes, tasking procedures, favored tactics, expectations and responsibilities by size of the unit or rank of the officer, etc.
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slothropsez - there is nothing to interrupt. Knock yourself out.
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kevinkin - they are speaking operationally, not tactically. The forces on the map that are driving into enemy controlled territory on narrow fronts to deep depths behind the initial front are mechanized units. They penetrate deeply because of their mobility, at least as much as their armor. They also drive through the enemy defended zone with a greater indifference to his soft firepower coverage (long range MGs, registered artillery fire etc), and thus the whole defensive position "feels" softer to them, than it does to leg infantry. They have to hit dedicated AT weapons to hit something "hard enough" to impede their progress, and armies tend to have only limited amounts of that everywhere, and amounts of it concentrated enough to stop whole tank battalions or brigades only in chosen, important points.
Thus, up at that operational scale, reviewing the moves on a map, the armor formations feel like spears. They have harder points than most of the enemy defense - all the places where the defender doesn't have concentrated AT weapons are "soft" to concentrated armor. And they can be driven deeper into the enemy positions, more rapidly.
Then their operational role is to create paths for other units to follow and expand. Truck infantry follows them. Leg infantry widens the holes they made, with its slower artillery support.
Understand, artillery tactically may seem like it is the longest reached combat system with its 10 miles range from any given position. But to pick up a serious amount of it and move them forward 25 miles, you have to haul their ammo weight with them. Horse drawn guns are not going to do that rapidly, or through a blasted moonscape, or enemy shellfire, with any rapidity. Motorized guns can do more, sure, but still can't move large ammo dumps of a million shells on a few hour time scale. Tank units, on the other hand, haul their fighting power with them through the enemy defended zone, to points 25 to 50 miles farther on in a day or two. The logistic thruput to keep up full artillery parks with such rates of advance did not exist in any army. A few guns could get forward with limited ammo supply. But more of both only caught up, built up, and enabled large scale fire support again, after the front stopped moving and logistics and transport had time to shift ammo forward to their new positions.
Thus, mechanized forces were indeed the spearheads. Just on a large time and space scale, than a tactical CM battlefield.
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kevinkin - well you may not be complaining, but I will. Barren, sterile, pointless, nothing to do with CM, always jumping in and trashing promising threads. Not referring to any person, just to talking politics at the dinner table. Give it rest, for the love of God.
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Clarifying - it isn't easy to hit 20/20 within 2 inches at 100 yards with a bolt rifle. It takes some skill and plenty of care and attention to get that result. But the challenge is just to hit so close, so consistently. Hitting a man sized target at that range isn't hard.
20 shots is a normal string of fire in competition shooting. A match can consist of 2 to 5 strings of fire, each at a different range and stance combination (standing, kneeling, prone, 200, 300, 500 yards e.g.). The SR-1 target uses smaller rings to simulate the 200 yard target at 100 - a bit easier, actually, because it is the same angle needed or apparent size, but there is less bullet drop (none, basically, given a typical zero).
US army BRM requires only 70% hit to pass and 90% for expert qualification, in a total of 40 rounds. But the target ranges vary from 50 to 300 yards, and the biggest is they are pop ups, only briefly visible. The 50 and 75 ranges are 1/3rd man suzed, head and shoulders - the longer ones an upright man sized. They are visible for 3-5 seconds for the close ranges, about twice that at the longest ranges. Sometimes 2 come up at once, each can be left or right at all but the longest ranges. The firing positions are prone for one string, and standing supported for the other (side of a foxhole, firing step stuff).
The bits of realism in BRM are varied ranges and brief exposure. But the targets are all in a narrow assigned arc, they are stationary while they are up, the ranges are known, the firing positions are the best ones, the time available to engage is sufficient, increasing for long shots. And nobody is shooting back at you. You can qualify even if you miss all the 300 yard targets, and only those and the 250s have significant bullet drop.
The result of the bits of realism is there are some misses, but not too many. The range conditions represent an ideal of what a rifleman will be called on to do in combat - cover a narrow pencil of approach vs exposed enemy infantry within 300 yards. You wouldn't see those scores even for that ideal, because - targets are moving, firing positions can include poorer ones, fear factor and suppression and hurry, exposures are faster and less of a whole person, more cover. You would also see more ammo used in the poorest conditions, less in the better ones, because the hits aren't fired again but the misses will be.
The point of the examples, though, is that the average trained man can be expected to hit a man sized target 70% of the time or more, out to much longer ranges, and *will* hit a full manned sized target very consistently at anything as close as 100 yards. No problem. Real combat doesn't achieve that, because real combat shooting *starts* with everyone being able to do that. Of course all the shots people actually get and take are much worse, because anyone who hands the enemy a shot that good goes down in less than half a minute.
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Poesel - all of them. *All* misses at typical effective ranges are caused by actual, non-ideal, firing conditions. There is nothing else to model. The degradation in accuracy due to real shooting conditions *is* the item that needs modeling in the first place.
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Not even remotely.
I go to a rifle range. I set an SR-1 target at 100 meters. I open a box of 20 rounds of .308. I take a bolt action rifle and fire at the target, deliberately and carefully. All 20 rounds hit within 2 inches of the target center.
Is the realistic accuracy of a bolt rifle in CM supposed to be that 20 out of 20 rounds fired at 100 meters hit their target, as long as the target is at least 4 inches across?
No. Because the conditions in my real world benchmark, and in typical real combat shooting with bolt action rifles, are not the same. They are not close. They are not off by a little smidgen. They instead have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
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Combatinman has it right for a division slice, but the thing to remember about WW II Russians and their rifle armies ("combined arms armies", technically) was that they have twice as much overall fire support as the divisional slice itself. Half the guns, and the bigger half, are up at army level, and get assigned to support this or that division for this or that operation, at any given stage.
Every level has its organic fire support, for 82mm mortars at battalion, on up. The commander at that level can count on having that much, it will never be "pulled" from him. But the higher muckety mucks direct the overall battle precisely by handing out double that firepower to the bits they care about, for the missions they think need it. Half the ATGs are independent AT regiments and brigades; half the mortar firepower (and the heavier half) are regiments of 120mm mortars, again independent; half the tube artillery, with 122mm guns and 152mm howitzers rather than 76s and 122s, respectively, is up at army level, too. Independent SU regiments and tank regiments and brigades, likewise, are all in the army commander's kit bag.
The army commander is *not* expected to dole out all this extra stuff in even division slices. The division that has a defensive role isn't given anything, or it is given an ATG formation because it is in good tank country. The division that has the attack main effort gets a tank brigade, and a 120mm mortar regiment, and as much 122 and 152 gun formations as its organic div arty, on top of that div arty.
The organic "slice" is a minimum level, in other words. The skies the limit on the high side, but triple the division slice amount, in throw weight, would be perfectly normal for an important part of the overall operation.
The Russians used this system because it put the combined arms mix decision in the hands of a few experienced general officers and their professionally competent staffs. You only needed one professional and competent per army this way, instead of needing one in every one of its 6 to 9 component divisions. The muckety muck in charge was responsible for giving the formations below him the tools they needed to accomplish their part of the overall plan, and for deciding on that plan. The division commanders were responsible for using it effectively to accomplish their formation's mission. And lower than that, the field grade guys were just responsible for "laying their ship alongside the enemy" and fighting hard enough.
If they fought hard enough but failed, it was their superior's fault - they clearly hadn't been given a feasible mission or the right tools, in that case. A long casualty roll was proof positive of trying hard - success, of course, was always welcome too. To fail without a long casualty roll was a sign of not having tried hard enough and was the subordinate's fault.
PS CaptainHawkeye is exactly right about the focus being on the Russian's own plan, and pushing it forward, and not on where the enemy was, or recon, or avoiding them. They were looking to execute their planned movement, and to kill anything that got in the way, and expected to only get places by such killing. The mech forces would spend a little bit more effort on looking for a weak point and directing their main effort there. But even in the mech arm, the following "echelons" mechanically followed that chosen "point of main effort", with a one two three of "first hits them to find and fix, second flanks them (close, one side only) to push them aside, third runs through the hole". Those were to be delivered at speed, hard, not reacting much to where the enemy was found or what he was doing. Instead force him around so that the rest of the friendly-side plan makes sense.
The watchword in all of it was simplicity, as well as aggressiveness. They wanted tactics that they could teach to any brave and reasonably competent officer, that were clear in the expectations and requirements of each level and role, that the average could execute - and that were robust enough to work and be effective if that average was supplied. They weren't aiming at brilliancy and they didn't want the plan to fail if they didn't get brilliancy. Too many plans would have failed too soon, if they had.
The downside of this approach is that it can become predictable. The upside is that a mass army can actually learn and apply it.
And that in practice, there is so much confusion and friction in war that simplicity is a very underrated military virtue, of the first importance.
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You can't tell if a PPsH is too accurate in CM if you only test it under conditions that will never actually occur in a CM fight. A massed target on a train track at 35 meters would not serve, for example. And neither will shots at fanatics who don't take cover, nor shots delivered on shooting range conditions of perfect safety and an immobile target, in plain view, that can't fire back. The realistic accuracy for those range conditions is close to 100%, so you won't find "too high". Those conditions just never actually occur. And the achieved accuracy we care about, that impacts actual CM fights, is the achieve accuracy that is actually seen in real CM fights. Which means shots taken under far more realistic conditions, which are poorer conditions. Nothing you find if you ignore that fact will tell us anything, one way or the other, about actual PPsH accuracy in actual CM firefights.
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Maybe a meeting engagement battle type? Fortifications are restricted to defenders in certain battle types etc.
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Doug - P-39s weren't particular tank busters in anyone's service. The Russian models often replaced the centerline cannon with a 20mm, as better in air combat. There was no particular shortage of ammo for Shermans. I doubt they got the APCR for 76mm Shermans that the US had, that would be about it.
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If in removing parameters you also remove reality, there is no way of determining whether the results are realistic or not.
Reality provides a benchmark for game outcomes, only if the typical conditions of fire are kept.
Yes you have to run more trials to determine the average achieved per shot accuracy of infantry fire when under fire yourself. But the achieved accuracy when you are shooting clay pigeons on a firing range we already know - it is infinite, compared to anything that happens in real combat. Doesn't help us.
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Poesel - don't use fanatics. Use regulars. Don't prevent the target from shooting back - let them shoot back. Use multiple "lanes" to get sample size. In some lanes have 1 shooter on each side, in others have 2 vs 1, in others 3 vs 1. Vary the ranges - some 50, some 100, some 150 meters. Vary the cover - sometimes the more numerous shooter side has little, usually they have reasonable cover - say steppe or wheatfield for the former, wood building could work for the latter. Put the less numerous side in several types - little / wheat, light woods, wood building, wooded foxhole as a progression from poor to good, for example. Don't put SMGs on both sides, put them on the more numerous side (shooter number). The other side should have an LMG and rifle squad with 1-2 SMGs only.
Fire until half the ammo load of the SMG side is expended - we can infer the rest. Report the time that takes, the hits on each side, suppression levels hit, hits per round fired stats, and the like.
What do we expect? That at 50 meters, more numerous SMGs will establish fire dominance, pin or break their target. They might fail in some even number of shooter cases, particularly if in worse cover, that's it. They won't shoot the other guys down to the last man unless the other side's cover is poor. At 150 meters, we expect the SMGs to be relatively ineffective if the defenders have reasonable cover. They should only experience some suppression and 1-2 men hit, not get "gutted" by outright hits and kills.
That is, we expect a tactical relationship - close enough or an exposed target plus more numerous shooters, the SMGs should "rock". Far enough, into enough cover, they should only "tickle" and should not "kill".
Is that clear enough?
Soviet Storm
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
Claims aren't kills. Kind of the entire point. Russian air to ground kill claims destroyed the entire German army several times over, which must be why their ground forces had such an easy time of it and just walked to Germany without losing a nail...