JasonC
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Posts posted by JasonC
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While mortars in the sense of high trajectiry shell throwers have been around for centuries, the modern mortar was invented early in WWI as a trench fighting weapon.
The name "mortar" comes from the mortar and pestle, the kitchen utensil for grinding spices and such. The name was given to very wide mouth, short shell throwers using a very high trajectory, originally as a countermeasure to bastion defenses against direct fire guns in the early modern era. Vertical stone walls were readily cut down by horizontal cannon fire directed at their base, since that part of the structure has to bear the weight of the rest of the wall above. Fortress designers thus countered the rise of artillery by shifting to low thick walls of packed earth, only faced with stone, which were not carrying such weights and were dynamically stable, thus abke to ignore narrow holes punched into them by siolid shot. Bastion defenses then covered the approach to such low walls - inherently more open to escalade - with cross fire from cannon mounted on top of those low walls, or in galleries punched into their sides, etc.
It was that series that prompted the seige mortar, to fire high explosive shell rather than solid shot, over rather than into the walls, to suppress the defending batteries with blast. They also just shell fort interiors, fired towns, and the like. The shells were primitive, with cloth fuzes cut very inexactly to a hoped for effective length, innacurate, etc. but they served, as seige weapons. Bht they also weighed tons, and were in no way an infantry weapon.
Note that some confusion is still caused by terms borrowedd from that history. Very heavy German seige artillery would get weapon titles if "morser" as stubby high trajectory seige guns, when they are properly howitzers (just big ones) - and some then confuse those with modern mortars.
The modern mortar, on the other hand, is the Brandt-Stokes mortar, named for its early WWI inventors and perfectors, respectively. They called them mortars because they were very high trajectory, low velocity, semi seige warfare weapons, in their early form. But they were designed around much longer tubes, with much smaller caliber, and above all man packable when dissambled. Allowing them to be manhandled to their forward firing positions in range of enemy trenches, where they tried to drop their grenade sized "bombs" between the front and back walls of enemy trenches.
In that form, the mortar dates only from late 1914, and was perfected and fielded in numbers only in 1915-16.
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As a point of history, the VG division wave was formed in response to the summer losses in both Bagration and France. The first VG divisions entered combat in early September, notably in Lorraine vs US 3rd Army. We shouldn't have to wait until the Bulge fighting in December to see them.
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First, I wouldn't assume from one observers mis-ID practices that every reference to something as common as a T-34 must involve a similar mistake, or refer exclusively to the older T-34/76. Most T-34/85s were probably being reported correctly.
Second, the first large scale use of T-34/85s was Bagration, and they equipped entire tank corps with them whenever possible, to simplify spare parts logistics and the like. There were 2 full tank corps so equipped in the northern part of the front. Later they do appear at the tank brigade scale in the independent brigades (only after the type became far more numerous); they were not mixed below that level.
T-34/76s were leaving the force through losses, and the average turnover of the Russian tank fleet was as fast as once turn per year. That did fall in the last 6 months of the war, however. They ended the war with a fleet of about 30,000 AFVs with a production rate north of 20,000 a year. This means it was an exceptional tank that was still in service even 1 full year after its production date. There were such, and some of the old models would still be around to the end of the war, but they were not a numerically dominant type anymore, by that late a date. In mid 1944 they still were the majority of medium tanks.
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cool breeze - I can explain the wood part two ways, one a priori and one experimental. The experimental first - go find the Mythbusters episode where they shot cannonballs through the side of a mocked up wooden ship era ship wall, with pigs on the other side as all the splinters went flying from the cannon hole. Superficial scratches were all they found. Of course the details are different, but the principle is not. Small splinters of wood have very little mass, no sectional density to speak of, and lots of total area for air resistance to slow them down. They are remarkably poor penetrators. Much larger chunks if they hit straight like an arrow can indeed penetrate, but both are rare among fragments (enough size, and the orientation of the hit).
Compare the casing of the actual shell. It is mild steel and blown into thousands of fragments, each hard enough to keep going through anything water-like it hits. Some get too small to carry very far before slowing down to less than lethal velocities, and that's why it is much safer to stand far from a shell going off than near one. But all of them start at lethal velocities and they are all hard enough to penetrate well. Are they large enough to cause significant injury, and do they intersect a man in the target area, become the only variables.
The energy from the explosion of the shell is driving primary or secondary fragments. Using secondary ones just means a worse material to use and lots of dissipated energy, spent tearing the tree apart to use its bits, etc. Better if the same energy is in the shell fragments than in the tree fragments. It is an illusion to think the explosion can be made more deadly by being spread into more physical material of worse composition.
Even shrapnel - spherical caseshot filled with metal balls - is actually marginally *less* effective than the same shell weight carrying more HE instead of the ball, because just driving the fragments of the shell casing to higher velocity is more important. But that's with perfect projectiles in terms of size and density and hardness, etc. With crappy materials and crappy random shapes hitting at mostly crappy angles, obviously the effect isn't going to go *up*.
Does this mean first hand accounts of the danger of being shelled in trees are rot? No, nothing like it, but the men who know that much don't need to understand all the physics of *why* it is dangerous. The reality is the big difference is purely the airburst. Hitting the deck even without other cover reduces the danger to a man from a ground burst artillery shell by as much as 90%. But it doesn't provide *any* protection, really, against an airburst at around 1/2 the casualty radius of the shell, into the air. You can get protection against airburst shells, but you need to e.g. hug the side of a foxhole with a steel helmet uppermost - to get protection comparable to just lying flat with no prepared position, against ground burst artillery shells. The same foxhole with head below ground would provide protection against everything but a nearly direct hit, vs ground burst artillery fire.
If the tree heights are between 1/2 the casualty radius of the shells hitting those trees and the full casualty radius, you get that huge air burst benefit - up to 10 times vs prone people without foxholes - with only a minor drawback for some shell fragments intercepted by trees in the way, and some energy dissipated uselessly into flying bits of wood. But raise the explosion height to 4 times the effective blast radius of the shell, and you'd have a complete "ceiling" or "dome" just protecting the guys on the ground by holding all the explosions so far away they can't hurt anything.
In reality you get a mix of those things, plus some proportion of ordinary ground impacts. But the net effect is greater danger if the shells are big enough and the trees are low enough. The men picked up on that net effect - the rest is fixation on the visually impressive etc.
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Tree splinter lethality is extremely overrated. The increased lethality of medium to heavy artillery in woods, vs infantry without overhead cover, comes pretty much entirely from raising the height at which the shell bursts, not from extra secondary projectiles. VT fuse artillery is more, not less, effective. Because it gets the extra height, gets the right amount of it, and doesn't intercept primary metal shell fragments with tree trunks. If you were picking a VT height for 60mm you'd pick around 5 meters, not 30.
With much lighter rounds, I would expect trees to do more to protect infantry, especially taller trees. A 60mm round is quite weak as artillery goes, and its effective blast radius is considerable smaller than the height of typical trees. The shells are simply going to explode so high if they do hit a tree, that the direct blast will do nothing to men on the ground. Yes there will still be primary metal shrapnel, but you don't get nearly as many shards big enough to inflict serious wounds from a 60mm as from say a 105mm shell. Tnen many of those will hit trees on their way toward a man on the ground, etc.
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Given the choice between discussing whether German armor doctrine was effective or wasn't, and discussing whether they wrote halt as they clearly did, or half as some fool on the internet guessed, the brilliant tacticans of this site spend 3 pages weighing in on the second "question". This is why I write for Board Game Geek these days, far more than this forum. Just saying...
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On shooting on the move, school and dreamed up doctrine might advocate it, but no one in history ever hit anything actually using it. Its just idiotic and a total waste of ammunition.
On the overall German armor doctrine, notice the concentrated offensive employment urged everywhere. Now ask how well that actually worked out in practice. Not all that well is the answer. Over the whole second half of the war, once facing veteran opponents with equipment and doctrine evolved by the war itself,and without the operational prereqs for it all too often, this doctrine led to the wholesale loss of masses of scarce German armor, to very little overall effect. The one to three day "seize the initiative" death ride happens over and over, and practically never achieves anyhting beyond a momentary pause in the enemy's momentum, if that. On two or three occasions it may stretch to a couple of weeks when enough mass is employed - meaning whole panzer armies and multiple panzer corps, not singke panzer battalions.
The point is, the greatest weakness of German armor doctrine in WWII is they never developed a realistuc and practical *defensive* armor doctrine. Even in the sense of local counterattacks within their defended zone. Many units *practiced* sensible fire brigade and reserve "linebacker" tactics, but they weren't applying anything from actual German doctrine as they did so - just ad hoc, practical adaptations. The doctrine was always telling them to gather everything armored up into one fist and launch it into space, deep in the other guy's defended zone, where the tanks were at their most vulnerable and had to fight diverse effective enemy AT arms with the worst tactical conditions conceivable. Then the muckety mucks would criticize any resulting failure as showing insufficient offensive spirit and willpower. It was a fantasts doctrine, driven by romantic to magical aspirations to recreate 1940-1941 without noticing the enemy was no longer brain-dead in doctrine and practically unarmed, in AT terms.
Above all, it did not even remotely work. So keep that in mind as you try to learn from and copy it.
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niall78 - thanks. Much of that I already know and agree with, though I would remark in passing that anyone shocked to find pointlessness in war hasn't thought about the matter very clearly. Pointless destruction is war's leading characteristic. I agree that strategic bombing was quite inefficient as a use of massive military resources. OR efficiency thinking was even more in its infancy in WW II than strategic air power was, and military theories in the matter were dominated, frankly, by science fiction. That said, exchange efficiency thinking is a quite demanding discipline, and most who approach it get practically everything about it wrong, including later historians who could be better informed. Too often they are satisfied with reporting the silliest things they can find among the conceptions of the day, letting hindsight make them look so much wiser - but without having the tools, data, or objectivity to assess the reality of the matter and put that reality in place of the misconceptions of the contemporaries.
I am seeing something similar in Stahel, for example, of a "moving the goalposts" variety, revisionism. Great operational victory X is a defeat because it didn't win the war and someone at the time hoped it would; since it couldn't and didn't, it was a crushing strategic defeat that it didn't immediately win the war. Um, no. Major operational victories are still victories even if unrealistic expectations of what they might accomplish didn't pan out. The standard is the reality of the whole war as a process and a competition. Not what men thought about it. And the measure against which accomplishments need to be ranked are first of all those of the enemy (the war - it is a competitive thing and doing better than the other guy kind of matters), and second, alternate uses of the same resources (the efficiency question). But not, what some contemporary dreamed it might do.
Anyway...
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niall78 - have my copy, but its down in a stack and haven't had a chance to read it yet - thanks for the "review"...
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Stahel is interested in the logistic limits the Germans faced, and in the command appreciations of each side at every stage of the campaign.
He makes much of the political interference with the military pros, and substantiates e.g. how dumb Stalin's interventions were, compared to e.g. Zhukov's quite accurate and realistic appreciations, which the Russian high command resisted as defeatist etc.
I haven't read all of them, so I can't give you more of an assessment than that - yet. But I can share further thoughts on his "take" as I read more of him.
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Here is a link to the PDF version of Infantry in Battle -
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The Tank Warfare book is good. You get the perspective of a modern armor officer, who gets things like logistic limits and readiness etc. He is objective about the occasional lack of realism of German side commanders etc.
As for what I'm reading, Stahel's three volumes on the critical phases of Barbarossa, Kiev 1941, Operation Typhoon, and the Battle fir Moscow.
Also reading (just finished, actually) an interesting US infantry school publication from between the wars, overseen by George Marshall when he was just a colonel, called Infantry in Battle. Full of short WWI AARs and their lessons, and a model of doctrinal realism IMO. Especially good on things like control, direction, the time things really take, and the ways commanders screw up by underestimating the difficulties of such things in real combat conditions. A ,ot of training or doctrine documents are infected by perfectionism and idealization - this one very determinedly is the opposite, realistic. With examples of doing things wrong at least as important as doing them right, drawn from real history. Also a model of clarity and knowing what it wants - no hemming and hawing with one the one hand, one the other hand etc. Examples taken from US, French, British, and German experiences, which also gives a picture of the professionalism of officer corps between the wars, studying WWI and determined to pass on lessons etc.
I believe it is a available on the web in PDF, through the "Trenches" WWI website. I'll see if I can find a link. (reading it in hardback myself...)
FWIW.
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kevinkin - I don't know that they were "pretty safe" if the whole division they were a part of was hit with a serious armor led attack, but against just infantry patrols and probes from a German formation opposite, sure. When actually attacked, rifle divisions frequently lost half the front line forces in a days action and could be fought out (effectively destroyed) in a few days. Being in the heavy weapons sections of a front line battalion in those circumstances would not confer much protection over being in the rifle companies. Some, but not much. Basically their fate would depend on their formation's fate. For a front line infantry company, its fate would very often be much worse than the whole unit's fate, and that would be unlikely to happen to the mortarmen. (Could draw heavy counterbattery on this or that occasion, I suppose, but not nearly as common as a front line company getting "picked on" and blown apart). If this is what you mean by "unless the lines were torn apart", then yes. Just understand, that wasn't a rare thing. If a Russian rifle formation was attacked by a mobile German division, it was the normal outcome. They practically never stopped the break in. Reserves might defeat it, layers might wear it out, etc. But the individual front line battalions directly hit never had a fun time...
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The battalion mortars were matched by battalion heavy MGs. Both were part of the ranged firepower scheme of the whole battalion. The 82s had the longest range of any of the battalion weapons and would normally be farthest back, but the MG platoons could be 400 to 800 meters frome the front line infantry positions themselves. The 82s would be near those in an offensive stance, to use more of their 2.5 kilometer range into the German positions. On defense, they could be 800 to 1200 meters behind the front and 400 meters or so behind the MG platoon positions. Their security came first from the normal infantry positions ahead of them, then from the MG fire scheme, and last from their own rifles and such, for close in defense. At night they might be co located with either type e.g. the reserve company of their battalion.
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Normally features like that in an agricultural region would be covered over be plowing and reuse of the land, eventually filling in old shellholes and erasing the marks of war. I suspect here we have a marginal area in terms of the land itself, coupled with enough mines and unexploded shells to discourage the attempt to reuse the land.
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kuri - we know what actual frontal assaults with armor support consist in and involve, and this isn't anything what they are like.
The only thing they get right is the equipment. The rest is choreographed Hollywood stuff designed to line up with a few human interest dramatic bits, put together with complete unreality.
Tanks don't attack by rolling forward in the open just to get close enough to be killed by Panzerfausts. They only move to get LOS to a new target.
Frontal infantry attack does not consist in everyone exposing themselves to walk upright mixed in with the tanks begging the enemy to open fire and maximizing losses the moment they do.
Frontal infantry attack also does not consist in just jogging forward until within grenade range.
When defenders reveal themselves by firing their weapons, infantry doesn't expose itself continually to give them as much as possible to shoot at while the tanks ignore them.
Instead the infantry goes to ground and the tanks fire at the defending machineguns. The defenders have to relocate because every IDed and stationary firing point is dead in less than a minute.
Attacking infantry exposes only a few men at a time with the others down - "packet movement".
Attacking infantry fires back to suppress defenders, with its LMGs and with its rifles, from cover.
A frontal attack is not about movement or trying to cross an area of open ground as rapidly as possible.
It is about fire dominance and relentlessness, not speed. (In that respect it differs fundamentally from flanking or turning movement attacking tactics).
Attackers don't close to the point of all getting themselves killed to the last man, suicides.
Instead the last sub-element of roughly the same size as the defenders on the frontage grabs whatever terrain it can and holds the ground gained, as a ratchet.
Only the leading elements representing the numerical superiority of the attackers presses; when the numbers have gone equal they stop pressing.
Plenty of attackers also drift off rearward rather than staying in the fight. As many leave the whole area of the fight - on both sides - as are hit on it.
The clip also has an incoherent "account" of the armor war, with limited PAK shown as knocked out, reducing the defense to close range infantry AT.
But it also shows all attacking tanks knocked out. Um, if the ranged AT defense is smashed, tanks will survive out of range of infantry AT and remain "intimidating" the defenders until ammo-dry.
The defenders actually have to separate the attackers from back to front using reverse slope effects, to avoid attacker's superior firepower.
They cannot all keep LOS to the whole field the attackers move across the whole time. They would simply all be shot down if they tried, entrenched or not.
The actual suppression dynamic of a frontal assault works by LOS-separation of attackers and defenders, and of trailing parts of the attack from leading parts of the attack.
This is what forces the attacker overwatch to move forward - it is also what protects the defenders from attacker firepower, shortens ranges (presented instead as a defender ammo issue as though the fight moves to grenade range because there aren't any bullets left, which is nonsense), brings infantry AT weapons into play, and the like.
The whole reason for the transition to grenade range fighting is falsified if the defenders are not shown deliberately going "heads down" in their holes to create such reverse slope effects, shying away from attacker firepower. The clip shows men reloading or on ammo runs below ground, that is all. The fight is presented as continuous in time, continuous in mutual vision, continuous in mutual exposure - all utter rot. Just not the way it happens.
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The usual ridiculous over exposure of infantry for the sake of the camera. Not impressed.
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I'd make tne game length around 30 minutes, but with the column taking up to 10 minutes to all arrive. That gives the recon a chance to do its thing, but when the main body arrives it has to get down to business reasonably rapidly. It is still enough time. I like giving the attacker an exit victory condition for the tanks, only, in scenarios like this. That penalizes the attacker for losing too many tanks or spending too long, but let's the infantry and weapons and soft transport stick around for the mop up, without a ruinous VP hit for any losses etc. i don't think you need 3 km deep, though, especially if there is enough tree cover to break up realy long LOS lines. I hope that helps.
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I get it. I would recommend building a blocking position like that around one heavy PAK, 3 tiles of AT mines (and maybe 2-4 of AP mines), a couple of grenadier platoons with an attached HMG section (2 MG42s), maybe 2 panzerschrecks, 2-3 tank hunter teams, one sniper. No armor or artillery support (maybe one on map 81mm mortar, I suppose). Overall, 75 to 100 men with a handful of effective AT weapons, representing a reduced company "making do". Some terrain bottlenecks or obstacles, but not a single route required of all vehicles - the AT mines shouldn't be guaranteed hits. (If vehicle recon "finds" them, they can be avoided etc.)
That is enough to give such a column trouble and give its recon something to do. With poor tactics on the Russian side, it should be able to mess them up and slow them down. With good combined arms tactics from the Russian side, they should be able to blow through it. I hope this helps.
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Capt - are you making this up? Again, I flat deny it.
Try reading the US army green books on the Normandy fighting, get a chapter you think matches what you think you are describing, and report the page numbers back here.
http://www.history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/resmat/ww2eamet.html
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CaptHawkeye - I deny it. They needed full positions to stop armor in Normandy, despite favorable defensive terrain. Whole panzer corps in the British sector, in fact. In the US sector, when they ran low enough on infantry that they could not hold the front line in sufficient density, the US readily broke through - and nothing stopped tneir armor columns after that. There were plenty of small units to try simple roadblocks, and plenty of fausts and schrecks, and still favorable terrain. But units like the 2nd Armored went through such thin stuff like a hot knife through butter. Heck, they went through panzer KGs like a hot knife through marginally thicker butter. Fundamentally, it was Allied HE arms reducing German infantry to thin screens that ensured breakout, precisely because thin infantry screens were hopeless against entire armored task forces. Even with the best defensive terrain and all the infantry AT weapons you could ask for.
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Fausts were historically 10 times as common as schrecks. The ratio between them increased over the course of the war.
Ad hoc tank hunters were the only kind early in the war, and would be uncommon late. But in 1944 might be as numerous as the schrecks.
That means THs and pioneers with demo charges and the like, as well as regular squads just using grenade bundles.
None of the above were terribly effective against Russian armor in the summer of 1944. The fausts weren't the best types yet, the schrecks weren't very numerous, the overall operational defeat led to units scattered and low on morale and combat effectives, etc. The biggest things the Germans had going for them were terrain related - plenty of water obstacles to work with, a limited road net through them, physical obstacles and mines supplementing those natural choke points etc. Even so, the most effective blocks were either mobile reserves with armor, or prepared city defensive zones that held out a while even surrounded, but at much larger than a few holdouts scale.
The idea that a few guys with fausts and MPs at a road corner were going to delay or impede a full armored column, on the other hand, is mostly fantasy.
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There can only be one response to Reiter's posts -
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Next on Korea and when the Norks lost their armor, the report that they were down to 40 runners at the Pusan perimeter is the US official history, "South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu". And no that isn't for the *end* of the Pusan fighting / through the pursuit, it is by the *beginning* of the perimeter battles. They had only about 40 T-34s and 20 SU-76s left *in running condition* at that point - compared to 11 rifle divisions, and the equivalent of at least 5 armor battalions on the US side (3 army, 1 marine actual battalions, plus single companies in the army infantry divisions).
On the air to ground stuff, of course the pilot claims are nonsense, nothing I am going on is based on those. The pilots believed that their air to ground rockets were their most effective weapons vs armor and that their guns were the next most effective. But battlefield OR established that napalm was what got the air to ground kills. There were single column attack sites with a score of knocked out AFVs burnt out by napalm (up to 40 claimed but only 20 confirmed at Chonan e.g.). The US far east air force flew 6,000 air to ground sorties before the fight stabilized at the Pusan perimeter. Effectiveness per sortie did not need to be high to get a significant portion of the very small NK armor force. OR found that 80% of all air to ground kills of AFVS were by napalm; those formed only 20% of pilot claims.
On later losses of NK armor, I don't doubt that such occurred, even if the NKs were down to 40 runners at the Pusan perimeter. They got replacement tanks, 20 at a time. They would also be putting back into service vehicles that fell out on the road marches south as they were repaired. Runners are never all tanks, and tank formations churn their vehicles through the repair categories before they are finally lost TWO. They could easily have lost 100 TWO before then and still have only had 40 runners left, with the rest all in repair categories by then but not in running status. Those would then have been permanently lost only after they trickled out of repair, or after the line moved north post Inchon.
Face vs Target Arc
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted · Edited by JasonC
Whiterider - units with a target arc turn to face the center of the arc. And yes, that is an engine limitation and doesn't always reflect tactical realities. It is the biggest deal with guns, which change facing so slowly. (IanL meant a fire command as his third facing specifier). Sometimes you would like a weapon to cover this whole field, but to be especially ready for a tank breaking cover from the left - in those cases you have to choose. If the chance of distraction is low you might pick face. But usually it will be better to set a covered arc that may include more than you'd like, just to get that arcs center facing the right way.