John D Salt
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Posts posted by John D Salt
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ISTR that Bruce Quarrie's book on tank battles on the Eastern Front used quotes from Sven Hassel books to add a touch of "realism".Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:Personally, if it isn't written by Guy Sajer, I don't believe it could possibly be true.
Personally, I think that none of the sources so far mentioned are as good as an obscure Jo Cordes soft-porn cartoon called "Gretchen et le SS Panzer du Mort", which I think I might still have knocking around in an old copy of "Fluide Glaciale" or "Pilote".
In English, of course, there is the epic "Peter Rabbit, Tank Killer"...
All the best,
John.
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That is exactly the same passage as the one already cited from Lucas' "War on the Eastern Front", and it seems to have been quoted without attribution by the owner of the site.Originally posted by Paul Jungnitsch:A description of what it was like to be on the receiving end of a Nebelwerfer attack here, Nebelwerfer Rocket Artillery
All the best,
John.
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It doesn't seem to me that he was likely to be right about this. As I said before, talking nonsense about blast is a common activity, even among people who should know better.Originally posted by kevsharr:As for the effect's of the nebelwerfer [that Carell also mention's]I turn to James Lucas from his book War on the Eastern Front..
"There were several very interesting and apocryphal stories concerning the Nebewerfer.One of these was that the rocket's used in the first month's of the waragainst the Soviet Union had been charged with liquid oxygen explosive.The presence of so many dead showing no external sign's of injury seemed to support that theory.The truth was more prosaic.The rapid and succesive detonation's produced during a Nebelwerfer barrage produced such rapid variation's in air pressure within the bombarded zone that many victim's suffered extensive damage to their lung's which killed them."
I guess Carell was right about one thing in his extensive but inaccurate writing's.
The following table is originally due to D W Kitzier, and is quoted in Dr Nick Colovos' "Blast Injuries", available at mediccom.org/public/tadmat/training/ NDMS/Blast_Document.pdf
Peak overpressure (psi) Effect
5...........Possible eardrum rupture
15..........50% incidence of eardrum rupture
30..........Possible lung injury
40..........Concrete shatters
75..........50% incidence of lung injury
100.........Possible fatal injuries
200.........Death more likely than not
This table does not specify the impulse duration, but we may assume from the context in which it was found that it reflects conditions typical of high explosive blasts of the size likely to be found in the field.
According to Andrew C Victor's "Warhead peformance calculations for threat hazard assessment", available at members.aol.com/Andrewvict/WRHDPRFM.pdf
The threshold blast overpressure for eardrum damage occurs at a scaled distance (in feet) of about (12 ft/lb ^ 1/3) from the explosion of a given weight of TNT (more powerful explosives such as RDX will count as a slightly greater equivalent weight).
It's not clear what kind of "Nebelwerfer" is under discussion here, so to be as charitable as possible, let's consider the 28cm Worfkörper Spreng, which I believe has an explosive filling of 110 lbs, about the largest the Wehrmacht fielded. Let's bump this up to 125 lbs for ease of cube-rooting, assuming still kore charitable that the explosive used is 15% more powerful than TNT. This means that the threshold blast level for ear damage would be about 60 feet from the burst. If I am reading the graph in Victor's fig. 4 correctly, the distance for "possible lung injury" (30 psi) would be at about 25 feet and for "possible fatal injury" (100 psi) at about 12 feet.
The total weight of the 28cm Wurfkörper Spreng round is 181 lb. Deducting 110 lb for the explosive filling and 15 lb for the propellant leaves us with 56 lbs of rocket casing that will produce high-velocity fragments (and Victor has plenty to say about fragmentation effects, too). I think that the likely effects of being within 25 feet of such a mass of fragmenting metal are likely to be a good deal worse than "possible lung injury". Certainly I cannot imagine many people escaping with "no external signs of injury".
If blast had indeed been the mechanism that caused these people's deaths, one would expect to see a very high incidence of ruptured eardrums in troops subjected to MRL bombardment. I have never heard of such a thing being reported.
A simple explanation for the observation of dead bodies with "no external signs of injury" is that they were killed by small high-velocity fragments. As I've already pointed out, a 1g fragment moving at the sort of speed HE can send it is big enough to kill, but small enough that the injury it causes is unlikely to be noticed on casual inspection. This, I suspect, accounts for all the stories one hears -- and not only about Nebelwerfers -- where people are supposed to have been left dead but unmarked by blast.
All the best,
John.
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The only one I can find in a quick search (linked from Andres' excellent Beobachtungsabteilung site) is:Originally posted by kevsharr:So Paul Carell is famous for his inaccuracies could you direct me to a site that verifies this?
http://www.nachkriegsdeutschland.de/p_paul_carell.html
...which as you might guess is in German. I don't read German well enough to follow it closely. If you don't read German, you might have some fun with this site and Babelfish.
I do not for one moment dispute that he is a very accomplished propagandist.Originally posted by kevsharr:Most of his book's are made up of anecdotal information and if there all lies he's got a pretty good imagination
All the best,
John.
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The lack of dynamic lighting has already been mentioned; this is a graphics limitation, and a separate concern from how one would model surveillance and target acquisition at night.Originally posted by Walpurgis Night:I watched the _Band of Brothers_ series over the holiday, and noticed the use of flares at night by the 101st/Krauts at Bastogne. Flares might be a really interesting addition to a game that emphasizes small tactical battles like CMBB.
Any thoughts?
I suspect that considerable changes to the way STA is currently done would be needed to model night-fighting adequately. The background against which a target is viewed would make a considerable difference to the range at which a target can be spotted, and doing this would I think necessarily entail an end to Borg spotting. It would also be quite a nasty computational problem, having to project a line-of-sight from spotter through target and on to whatever the viewing background happens to be.
Flares are, in my experience, surprisingly dreadful at helping you see people at night, but they are likely to make any enemy near them drop to the ground and freeze, for fear of being seen. Much more likely to actually find an enemy is the trip-flare (which a good O-O programmer should be able to model simply as inheriting some behaviour from mines and some from flares), because when the trip-flare goes off, you know that's where the enemy is -- unless, of course, it was a rabbit that set it off.
The other thing that would need to be modelled is the common habit of firing at gun-flashes, which are visible many times further than people in most low-light conditions. Once the gun flashes have started, that's your night-vision wrecked -- and if the game is going to last more than 15 turns, you might want to model the slow return of full dark adaption.
Sound detections become noticeably more important at night; I don't know how sophisticated the current sound detection model is.
It would be fun to be able to buy "Monty's Moonlight", searchlights reflected off low cloud to provide some degree of overall battlefield illumination (usuallly only "movement light" rather than "fighting light"). I don't think any white-light searchlights were used for direct battlefield illumination, but I'm sure there would be great demand for the late-war German IR searchlights and viewers and Amercian IR goggles.
The easiest thing to model will probably be the infra-red warning detectors the Wehrmacht issued during the Saar campaign in 1940. These were small, man-portable warners, intended to tell infantry patrols if they were being illuminated by French IR searchlights. As the warning detectors never, ever activated, they were quite soon discarded as useless deadweight; only later did it become apparent that the French had never fielded any infra-red searchlights.
All the best,
John.
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That is rather different from my understanding of how reconaissance by fire is supposed to work. The current US Army doctrine states that reconnaissance by fire is intended to make the enemy disclose his position by firing or moving. I have always imagined that the most likely response it would provoke would be return fire.Originally posted by Battlefront.com:[snips]
The question about how a unit would react under fire does depend greatly on the specific circumstances. I generally agree with the things John D. Salt stated on the previous page, but with one exception.
Recon by Fire is designed to flush the quarry out into the open by beating on the bush with a stick, using birding terms. In war terms you shoot into a suspected hiding place and see what runs out. Ask yourself... how could Recon by Fire work if the target just hunkered down? Answer... it wouldn't work.
[snips]
http://call.army.mil/products/ctc_bull/96-10/chp3pt2.htm
points out that the effectiveness of the technique depends on how well-trained the enemy are. If they have the discipline to sit tight as the bullets whizz over, then indeed it will be an ineffective technique, at least as far as its reconnaissance function goes.
It is hard for me to draw a clear distinction between reconnaissance by fire and what in WW2 was termed "prophylactic fire". Evidently the intent of the former is to find the enemy and the intent of the latter is to discourage any enemy who might be around from interfering with you, but both of them would look pretty much like shooting up the countryside on mere suspicion. If the target did not often "just hunker down", then prophylactic fire would not work.
Whatever you call it, I cannot recall ever having heard of fire being applied to act as a sort of grouse-beater to beat the "birds" out of cover and on to the guns. "Grouse-beating" tactics are often used -- "hammer and anvil" is a more popular term in the US as it sounds a good deal steelier -- but the "hammer" is as far as I'm aware always a line of troops physically occupying the ground rather than just brassing it up. I have played this sort of game in woods-clearing exercises in the TA, and a similar technique is advised for clearing villages. It needs the "grouse-beaters" to walk through the area to be cleared. Real grouses (grice?) are not daft enough to break cover until the beaters are nearly on them, and I doubt that real people are appreciably dafter.
There are, of course, actual accounts of soldiers running for it. I suspect that a lot of these are withdrawals that were originally supposed to be organised but in the event were not. In CM:BB terms, this would be a spot of bad luck with the "W" command.
I have already mentioned that Hal Moore observed that the Viet Namese he was fighting tended to lie down under HE but get up and run around under napalm or WP. I suggest, then, that it might be reasonable to make the specific effect of an adverse morale result dependent on the event that caused it (the WRG Napoleonics minatures rules show how this idea can use lots of very simple reaction tests to create a very rich variety of reaction behaviour). Broadly, one might say that a failure of courage in the face of bullet or fragmentation fire makes people get their heads down in cover, and in the face of specified "terror weapons" makes them run away, like Bold Sir Robin. What counts as a "terror weapon" probably ought to depend on training, but flame weapons would be especially likely to count (though documents I've seen on flamethrowers point out that they are much more effective against troops not trained to face them), and so I think would the threat of close combat. Tanks might count, especially at night. I remark here that of the two cases of soldiers leaving cover and running mentioned in the account of the Yazov Stariy battle posted by Mike Dorosh, one was apparently after the tanks had been heard but before they had been sighted, and the other was after the man had been wounded (in CM:BB terms simply a reduction of 1 in section strength). The account also specifically mentions that these troops had not been trained to fight tanks. I am sure all the old SL fans remember the "tank terror" rule in "Cross of Iron", too.
So, to conclude -- the behaviour I think I would find most convincing would be for troops panicked by fire (as distinct from a fubbed withdrawal) normally to get their heads down, but if attacked by a nominated terror weapon (flame, bayonets, possibly tanks, Stukas, MRLs) to run away from the threat (no, I don't know how you run away from a dive-bomber, but as Rincewind points out you always run away from not towards ).
It would also be fun to have something like the "chain panic" rule in Advance Tobruk, so that when one section is seen to be legging it to the rear, a lot of other people witnessing the occurrence might feel obliged to join it.
I expect this is mostly or all beyond the scope of any imaginable patch, but these are things to mull over as the new engine starts to gestate.
There are plenty of other things to be said about the modelling of infantry, but I've blethered enough for one day.
All the best,
John.
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Paul Carell is famous for the inaccuracy of of his accounts, so I would tend simply to disregard this as evidence for some mysterious blast weapon unless it can be supported from another independent source.Originally posted by kevsharr:Paul Carell in his book "Hitler moves East"[which by the way is an outstanding book,a must read]relates this episode and it was caused by the concussive effect of the nebelwerfer
A good deal of nonsense is talked about blast, often even by servicemen who really should know better. Blast is a very poor method of inflicting personnel casualties, whereas fast-moving pieces of metal work extremely well even in tiny sizes (a gram or so is plenty). Even with those very rare munitions that genuinely do contain more explosive than fragmentation material (and I'd bet that this includes no artillery weapons at all) are still likely to produce considerable amounts of secondary fragmentation, i.e. fragments that are not formed from the projectile material.
On the question of FAE, I believe that there were rumours of a large FAE weapon being used during the reduction of the Warsaw Ghetto, but that these were never confirmed. CM:BB players familiar with the way the Sturmtiger's weapon is modelled might see how it might be mistaken for an FAE weapon, as I believe Warsaw was the only place the Sturmtiger was used outside Germany.
All the best,
John.
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Shatter gap, I should think.Originally posted by Shifty 101:I noticed in a QB I played lately that the KV-1 can penetrate more armor at 500m then at 100m, why is this?
At very close range, the projectile's striking velocity is so high that it shatters on impact with the armour. While shattered penetrations are possible, it will not perform as well as it would striking at a lower velocity such that the projectile remains more or less intact as it penetrates.
This is all explained in Rexford's book, which no really serious WW2 wargamer should be without.
All the best,
John.
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The biggest difference I would expect is, as I mentioned in passing, that you could not clear any but the smallest area of cover just by shooting blindly into it and then chopping down the infantrymen occupying it as they run out (in a known direction, towards their own baseline).Originally posted by Andreas:What is the difference in overall game/simulation outcome terms between:
1) a unit routing, running away, and being killed in the process
2) a unit routing, cowering, and surrendering to the nearest enemy?
Instead, you would actually have to have some trogs with fixed bayonets clear through the cover and force the cringing baddies to surrender(assuming that the enemy has to approach to close quarters before you surrender to them).
With troops in slit trenches, ISTM that this is the normal way in which you would expect a successful attack to unfold; "crump" from the intial bombardment keeps the defenders' heads down, a variable amount of fire is exchanged if the defenders recover quickly enough, the attackers win the firefight and approach the defensive position by fire and movement, and when the first fit attackers make it into the defenders' position, the defenders surrender.
This is not what I see in CM: In CM, once you have put enough fire on the defenders to win the firefight, you seem to need only a little more to persuade them to get up out of their holes into the open and try to run away. There is no need to clear them out of their holes with the bayonet.
If they spent more time lying down and less running around when panicked, infantry would presumably be harder to kill, simply because they would not expose themselves so much. I suspect that the more "inert" behaviour would also be a good deal easier to program.
All the best,
John.
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I don't think anyone is disputing that people do things in combat that, with the assitance of mature reflection in calm surroundings with a glass of port to hand, might not seem terribly rational.Originally posted by leakyD:Though i agree the engine could use some tweaking (no simulation is perfect (it is, after all, a *simulation*), irratonal behavior under fire would seem to be quite common.
not sure? [snips]
That isn't the point, though; the point is whether standing up and running is the way people actually do behave in combat. I must say that I don't think it is anything like as common as either Squad Leader or CM would have us believe. Certainly I don't read about it in battle accounts anything like as much as the act of simply freezing and refusing to move, and this is what commentators like Marshall, Holmes, Griffith and Ellis seem to emphasise.
Hal Moore's after-action report for the Ia Drang Valley says of the VC he was fighting that that "He is much more afraid of napalm and white phosphorous than HE. He goes to ground under HE fire. Under napalm and WP, he often gets up and runs around in disorder, and presents a better target for small arms, VT and HE."
If panicked infantry simply stayed in place until an active enemy came within some specified distance, then surrendered, I think I would find the game more convincing, and I think infantry would become still more indispensible, as AFVs could not clear woods as they can now by shooting them up and relying on the troops in the woods running out like driven pheasants.
All the best,
John.
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Rifles?Originally posted by Michael emrys:Just to add a little more confusion, consider the use of the word 'gun'. [snips] Of course, just about all direct fire, flat trajectory weapons are called guns, whether tank guns, AT guns, or AA guns.
Then there are machineguns, submachineguns (or, if you prefer, machine pistols), handguns, rifles
RIFLES?
Say after me...
"This is my rifle,
This is my gun,
This is for shooting,
And this is for fun."
As this is a respectable board, you don't need to do the actions.
I've heard infanteers get away with calling their rifle a "gat", but always they got a terrible wigging for calling it a "gun".
Heavens to Murgatroyd, it's worse than calling your respirator a gas-mask!
All the best,
John.
[ November 28, 2002, 06:21 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
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The clue's in the question, really. They are guns or howitzers on armoured chassis -- and so they have as wide a variety of tasks as artillery does.Originally posted by Sabrewolf:are they basically light tank?
Self-propelled field artillery (Wespe, Hummel, Priest, Bishop, Sexton, most modern SPs) does the same job as field artillery, overwhelmingly by indirect fire, but emplaces and displaces more rapidly than towed artillery and is less vulnerable to counter-bombardment.
Self-propelled rocket artillery (Maultier, Calliope) does the same job as rocket artillery, overwhelmingly by indirect fire, but emplaces and displaces more rapidly than towed rocket artillery and is less vulnerable to counter-bombardment.
Self-propelled anti-aircraft artillery (Ostwind, Wirbelwind, Flakwagens, Skink, Crusader AA) does the same job as towed AAA, but emplaces and displaces more rapidly.
Self-propelled close-support artillery or infantry howitzers (SU-76, Grille) does the same job as the infantry's own IGs or "accompanying guns", but with more mobility and a small measure of armoured protection.
Self-propelled anti-tank artillery (PzJag I, Marder, Hornisse, SU-57, 2-pdr portee, Deacon) destroys enemy armour in the same way as anti-tank guns, but with more mobility and a small measure of armoured protection. The Americans have a curious habit of giving their self-propelled anti-tank guns rotatinmg turrets, and calling them "tank destroyers" (M-10, M-18, M-36).
Self-propelled direct-fire artillery with thick armour protection (StuG III and IV, StuH 42) is called assault artillery (Sturmartillerie) by the Germans if it is general-purpose, or a hunting tank (Jadgpanzer) of it is intended mainly for anti-tank work (JagdPz IV, Elefant, Jadgpanther). Most Soviet SUs could be more or less accurately described by one or other of these categories, the SU-122 and -152 being of a more general-purpose nature and the -85 and -100 more tank killers.
All the best,
John.
All the best,
John.
[ November 26, 2002, 06:36 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
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It's true that when you look at the ground after an artillery concentration (Mr. Picky doesn't think barrages happen in CM), you will see more destroyed anti-tank teams and the like than destroyed sections (squads). However, I suspect that the reason is simply that you don;t see the "bodies" until an element is completely destroyed, and large groups of men are less likely to be completely destroyed than small ones.Originally posted by meditek:In CMBO I noticed how oddly specific the results of being caught in a barrage could be. At the end it often seemed to have picked off my machine gunners, flamethrowers and mortars while the ordinary guys were far less effected. In other words the shells were not truly random but seemed to follow some of the internal game rules concerning fire in general.
Is this true of CMBB?
meditek
Consider the case where the artillery is so dangerous that it knocks out half (that's 50%, or, if you prefer, seven in every fourteen) of the men in the area of effect.
The chance of a group of 2 men being completely destroyed is 25%.
For a 4-man group, it is 6%.
For an 8-man group, it is less than half of 1%.
You should reasonably expect to see a lot more dead 2-man groups than dead sections.
All the best,
John.
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Did any WW2 vintage mortars actually use stick fuzes? I've seen a study on them for the British 3-inch (81mm) mortar, but I don't think they were adopted.Originally posted by dragoon19:81mm mortars shells don´t have a time fuse at least not the ones I have worked with. What you do instead is to attach a metal 'stick' about 20cm long to the front of the grenade. In effect the granade then explodes 20cm above ground. The side effect of this little trick is that it makes the max range of the morter granade shorter and more influenced by wind factors. Still in heavy snow or very soft ground the blast from a 81mm is often very much below what you would expect.
Dragoon19
The only method of obtaining airburts from WW2 mortars I'm aware of is the "bouncing bomb" technique used in the Wurfgranate 39 bomb for the German 8cm (81mm) sGrW 34. When the bomb landed, a small propelling charge launched the bursting charge back into the air before it detonated.
All the best,
John.
[ November 25, 2002, 09:22 AM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
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I've had a T-34 end up immobilized in a road, I think by bogging irrecoverably in brush by the roadside and rolling into road terrain before the immobilization took effect.Originally posted by Eden Smallwood:A halftrack, bogged in "Road". Concrete type o' road, even. Is this supposed to be possible? [snips]
All the best,
John.
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Same here -- I got an auto-ceasefire minor defeat, trying it for the first time with the patch.Originally posted by MikeyD:Y'know, jgdpzr, I tried EXAACTLY those tactics and still got my butt fried. Maybe that's why I still enjoy playing the AI - I ain't smart enough to beat it!
All the best,
John.
[ November 22, 2002, 04:13 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
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All else being equal, surely the smaller the platoons the better; ultimately, having all your vehicles as "independent" would mean that none were ever out of command control, and you could deploy them however you liked.Originally posted by Tigrii:All else being equal(including cost), would you be better off with 2 platoons of 2 or one platoon of 4? About C&C: How far do radio-equipped tanks have to be to be out of range of the HQ?
The costs, of course, are never equal.
All the best,
John.
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The way I was trained, you wouldn't just count the bodies, you would make sure that they were dead, then search them, working in pairs and being very careful to check for booby-traps.Originally posted by xerxes:In the heat of battle you're going to go around counting bodies, putting back together body parts and counting weapons to find out exactly how many platoons were in that church? I think not.
I doubt that it's only the British army that does it this way.
All the best,
John.
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That's one definition, as used by the British during WW2 (although the critical angle was 40 degrees rather than 45). However, by that definition, the 88mm Flak 36 the 3.7" and US 90mm HAA guns, all of which can elevate well above 45 degrees, would qualify as howitzers, which they ain't.Originally posted by Tigrii:[snips]The difference between a howitzer and a gun is that a howitzer is generally meant for high angle fire and can elevate above 45 degrees. A gun is used for low angle, direct fire and can't elevate above 45 degrees.
Another definition, as used by the US, is to count as a howitzer anything with a calibre length below a certain figure (typically 30 or so).
The best "working" defintion -- none of these are perfect -- is in my opinion to say that it's a howitzer if it uses a charge system, a gun if it doesn't. Even at that I believe there are seperate-loading guns with a choice of two charges, so you might amend the definition to read "...if it uses a charge system of three or more charges". And, for Mr. Picky, doesn't otherwise qualify as a mortar.
Most "infantry guns" are in fact "infantry howitzers" in that they have charge systems.
A couple of British and Russian guns carried the designation "gun-howitzer", but if weapons designations were logical the hybrid name would probably apply to most WW2 field artillery pieces.
All the best,
John.
[ November 20, 2002, 07:06 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
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Indeed. I can imagine the senior staff officers in the campaign I've just joined adding these items to their forthcoming Combat Regulations:Originally posted by xerxes:Advance 100m in the open against an unsurpressed enemy? This is a trick question of some kind?
[snips]
1. The art of tactics consists largely in not attempting to move over open ground that is under fire from rockets, artillery, mortars, mechine-guns, etc.
2. Junior officers who incur large losses by attempting to move, &c., will not have them replaced.
All the best,
John.
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How many conventional weapons of 120mm calibre or above do you know that are not separate-loading?Originally posted by PantherG:Why do the 122 and 152s both load the cartridge seperately from the shell? This seems like a really stupid mistakes from the designers (of the guns, that is ). Why must they load seperately, if things like Hummels don't have to?
What evidence do you have that the main aramament of Wespe, Hummel, Grille and Jadgtiger were not separate-loading? My sources seem to say that they all were. Was this a really stupid mistake by their designers? Were the designers of the Chieftain's L11 120mm gun really stupid, too?
All the best,
John.
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If CM really wanted to do things the Corporate Suithead Way, they would charge support fees for all the patches, which would add a dribble of tantalisingly half-baked new features while never quite making the product stable enough to use without causing damagingly high blood-pressure.Originally posted by Silvio Manuel:[snips]...CM's policy on this, as it apparently differs from big corporate software patch policy (rush it!).
Oh, and they would charge $25,000 a copy.
All the best,
John.
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I can readily imagine these being successful against French troops, but against Germans???Originally posted by Michael emrys:</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by John D Salt:
...best of all, the exploding imitation frogs, used as booby-traps.
Michael</font>
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Oh, a Thread Marshal's counter-hijack, eh?Originally posted by Hans:Hey dog guys, thanks for the info but could we get back to tilt rod mines?
Thanks
Anybody out there with any knowledge of those types of mines being used in WWII?
My copy of TM 30-430, "Handbook on USSR Military Forces", says (page IX-135) that rod mines were used, but without giving any further detail other than to say that they are similar to the French (which it misspells "trench") "mine anti-char".
There is a whole demon's toyshop full of mine warfare nasties that could be modelled if Battlefront were so inclined -- whether it is worth it is another question, and traditionally wargamers have hardly bothered to deal with mine warfare at all.
The mine types mentioned in TM 30-430 that especially appeal to me are the LMG rocket-mine, which is essentially a HEAT rocket fired off a fixed spigot into the side of the tank that fouls the tripwire (the Galitski mine is reportedly similar); the OSM-152 "jumping" anti-personnel mine which launches a 152mm fragentation shell into the air when initiated (a 122mm version also existed); and, best of all, the exploding imitation frogs, used as booby-traps.
All the best,
John.
[ November 17, 2002, 03:32 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]
The ultimate embarrassment
in Combat Mission Archive #4 (2002)
Posted
"These light Honeys with their two-pounder 37-millimetre guns, the ugly box-shaped turrets, their little waving pennants, had never seen the battle before. They had come straight from the steel mills of America to the desert, and now for the first time we were going to see if they were good or bad or just more tanks.
"Gatehouse, with his heavy head, his big hooked nose, and his deep-set eyes, sat on his tank watching the battle, estimating the strength of the enemy, the position of the sun, the slope of the ground. Then he lifted up his radio mouthpiece and gave his order. At his command the Honeys did something that tanks don't do in the desert any more. Tbey charged. It was novel, reckless, unexpected, impetuous and terrific. They charged straight into the curtain of dust and fire that hid the German tanks and guns. They charged at speeds of nearly forty miles an hour and some of them came right out of the other side of the German lines. Then they turned and charged straight back again. They passed the German Mark IVs and Mark IIIs at a few hundred yards, near enough to see the white German crosses, near enough to see their shells hit and explode."
-- Alan Moorehead, "The Desert War" (abridged edition of "African Trilogy"), Hamish Hamilton, 1965.
All the best,
John.