John D Salt

Well now, this bids fair to be a horrifically interesting thread. Much of what has already been posted is interesting, but I have a couple of handfuls of worms to add to the can. The "realism vs. playability" chestnut is not really one I wish to pursue -- it's not clear to me what "realism" can sensibly mean in the wholly unreal world of a simulation, and almost everyone who discusses the matter confuses "realism" with "detail", which doesn't help. The "Commander's Boots" problem has been mentioned -- does the player represent Major Carstairs, OC of "B" Company the Borsetshire Light Infantry, or is the player a disembodied spirit, one of the household gods of the Company, looking down on all its members wherever they are? The question here is really "Do you want to play a role, or do you want to play a game?". Both are reasonable things to want to do; I would be happy to participate in a MUD set in WW2, but it would render competitive gaming problematic, if not impossible. The ultimate solution to the "Borg spotting problem" will require more effort than merely modelling communications channels and the orders and reports that flow along them. The comms infrastructure (whether using radio, telephone, flags, lights, runners or carrier pigeons) is merely the "plumbing" that permits messages to be transmitted from one place to another. What matters, from the point of view of tactical behaviour, is how the people who receive those orders or reports act on them. This, in turn, depends on how they integrate the new information into the picture of the tactical situation they currently have in their heads (as mentioned in van Creveld's superb "Command in War"). This is what is known as "situational awareness" (a web search on the name Micah Endersley might be a good start for people wanting to know more). Can this sort of thing be modelled in a computer simulation? Yes. The technique is known as "agent-based computing". The entities or "agents" in the simulation act autonomously, in accordance with their perceptions of their world and their beliefs about it, in order to achieve their goals. In effect, each agent has its own model of the (model) world in its "head". The way in which agents decide to act based on their knowledge and belief can be categorised under three headings: * Reactive agents. Behaviour can be represented by a memoryless finite-state machine; given the same stimuli, a reactive agent will always react in the same way. * Deliberative agents. Such agents do not have predetermined behaviour, but are capable of making and executing plans, and perhaps of learning from experience. * Affective agents. The responses of these agents will depend on some internal state which can be thought of as "emotion". The real interest of these is where they choose reactive or deliberative behaviour according to their current "emotional state". The agents' pursuit of their goals may entail them collaborating or competing with other agents. I have seen a research demonstrator, which used an agent-construction kit to implement some ideas from joint intention theory, communicate with a synthetic environment to model the behaviour of a tank squadron making a flank attack on an enemy platoon in defensive positions. The point of the demonstration was that this behaviour was not directly pre-programmed by the creators, but emerged as a result of negotiation between the individual entities in thge attacking squadron (with, one hopes, some regard for the niceties of military precendece). One of the fruits of such an approach would be that agents would not shoot at enemy agents of whose presence they were unaware (or could not infer -- their deliberations might tell them that if a friend can be seen to be shooting into a treeline, they should shoot into the same area as well). That's the borg disposed of. Another advantage would be that deception and surprise could be convincingly simulated. Each agent is maintaining an internal picture of how it interprets the battlefield. When new information arrives, it must be integrated with this picture; this will take time. If information is received that is at variance with this picture, it is likely to be discounted. If the picture is suddenly and shockingly shown to be completely wrong, it will take time to construct a new picture -- time that may not be available. It may be safer to abandon deliberation and perform a stereotyped drill. The business of simulating expectations and surprise suggests fresh approach to questions of troop quality and non-lethal weapon effects, too. Obviously, affective agents could have internal "emotional" states corresponding to fear, fatigue, anger, confusion and so on, which would affect their deliberations and reactions. This might provide a mechanism for simulating suppressive effects more convincing than merely treating them as results of direct-fire attacks. It might also serve as a means of distinguishing "veteran" and "green" troops, if one thinks that the main difference is the accuracy of their perceptions of danger on the battlefield. Veterans might be "sticky" because they know perfectly well when it is too dangerous to epose themselves, where green troops, knowing no better, rush in. Conversely, green troops might have an inaccurately exagerrated idea of a noisy but ineffectual threat. This would seem more satisfactory than a system of "morale ratings". It is probably too obvious to mention, but the reactions displayed by agents in "reactive" mode could be used, as well as simulating emotional reactions, to show the drills in which troops of different armies were trained. Well-drilled troops will have these almost as additional reflexes; untrained troops won't. It seems to me that an agent-based approach might lend itself to a treatment of leadership rather better than +1 or +2 bonuses on this and that: On the principle of "Look around you to see how scared you have a right to be", agents might take encouragement or discouragement from the observed behaviour of those around them. This might produce panic-spreading effects, especially where leaders or neighbours run for no apparent reason. The leadership task of keeping people in the picture could also be simulated -- the chapter "The Multiples of Information" in S L A Marshall's "Men Against Fire" touches on this, as does the School of Infantry's motto "Knowledge dispels fear". So, to being these meanderings to an end, ISTM that if we can take a modelling approach based primarily on modelling human perception and behaviour, instead of modelling the technical performance of weapons, it might be possible to take a unified approach to spotting, situational awareness, command control, leadership and morale using the same basic mechanisms. Agents are a pretty hot research topic at the moment; the kind of approach outlined above cannot be adopted just by reading a book and a couple fo papers on agents and situational awareness then sitting down to code. I'd give it at least five years, and maybe ten, before military research establishments are fully capable of exploiting such agent-based approaches in land tactical wargames. Whether the games industry gets there before them I'd say was a fifty-fifty proposition. Anyone else on the board going to the second AISB agent-based computing symposium at Imperial in April? All the best, John.

Any weapon equipped with a dial sight is capable of indirect fire, if you can arrange for data from a remote observer to be put on the sight. Alternatively, fixed points (Defensive Fire or DF tasks) can be registered and recorded, and the data for them applied to the sight when the command is received to fire a particular DF. All field artillery and medium or bigger mortars have dial sights. Many sustained-fire machine guns do, too. (To take a modern example, the same C16 dial sight is used on the British Army's 105mm Light Gun, 81mm mortar and FN MAG GPMG in the SF role.) The most extreme example I know is that of the SMLE Mk III*, the rifle the BEF went to France with in 1914; this could be equipped with a dial sight, so, yes, indirect fire was theoretically possible with rifles (I'm not aware of any case where this was done, but then I'm not a WW1 buff). Indeed, which is why I said it was, as far as it went, a good point. The same effect is observable when all SMGs become Tommy-guns, all British fighters become Spitfires, all SSMs become Exocets and all assault rifles become Kalashnokovs or Armalites. The misreporting effect is well attested -- I have seen an analysis of British tank casualties where kills by 7.5cm PaKs were often misreported as being by "88"s which says "the opposite error never occurred", and an intsum from 30 Corps which mistakenly deduces that Schurzen on the Pz IV are a disguise to make it look like a Tiger. The same linguistic phenomenon seems to occur even in stress-free situations where there is no particular reason to identify a general kind of article by a specific trade name -- here in the UK, all vacuum-cleaners are Hoovers and all ball-point pens are Biros, and all over the world brown oversweetened fizzy pop is called Coke regardless of what it really is. I took the "chief" referred to in "The Blond Moors are Coming!" to be the Battery Commander (BC). The fact that the BC was performing the job of observation officer rather than having it done by a more junior officer employed specifically for that purpose is, I think, a pretty good indication that indirect fire was not considered a primary mission for the battery. AIUI the BC might be the only officer capable of controlling the battery's fire in the field artillery of the Russian or Italian armies, but in the French, German, British and American armies one would expect one or two specialist FOOs to be part of the organisation (corrections welcome from those who know). I tend to agree, for most cases. There's a lot of difference between something being recorded as happening and something being an everyday occurrence (although if I took it into my head to challenge the board to provide specific instances of an s 10cm K 18 being fired indirect, could anyone furnish any? Would that be a reason for thinking it wasn't done?). The probability of *all* of it being true is zero; that some of it is true seems certain; and so we are left with the less-than-useful information that some proportion, more than zero but less than 100%, of such reports are true. I think that it is fairly well accepted (as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that a lot of what is loosely called "88" fire is probably from 10.5cm weapons such as the 10.5cm leFH 18. As to how the sharp-eyed vet could in principle tell the difference, I should think that supersonic arrival and the use of airburst shells would be good indicators of "88" fire (high rate of fire doesn't tell you because you don't know how many tubes are firing). Supersonic arrival would be likely to be commented on in personal accounts because of an understandable feeling of annoyance at the lack of warning. It would not in itself certainly indicate an "88", as there were other supersonic weapons. A lot of the "88"s in the Western Desert were in fact 7.62cm PaK 36®s, a good tank-killer and an adequate light field-gun, better suited to tank-shooting than the FlaK 18/36/37 because of its low silhouette. Gudmundsson's "On Artillery" mentions Gen. Ludwig Ritter von Eimannsburger, author of the 1934 book "Kampfwagenkrieg", who put forward the idea of the TuF-Kanone, "TuF" indicating "Tank und Flieger". To some extent both German and Russian artillery pieces seem to have reflected the TuF idea immediately before WW2, possibly because of common experience in Spain. A high-velocity fixed-ammunition gun is not the ideal weapon for field artillery use, but ISTM that there are two reasons why one might use one. The first is that there is nothing better available; if improvisation is the art of war, then it is as well to be able to press weapons into service for tasks other than their primary intended one. I can imagine the Germans being in this situation a lot towards the end of the war. The need for a dual-purpose field and ATk weapon was shown by the 7.5cm FK 7M85 and 7M59, essentially PaK 40 tubes on field artillery carriages. The second is that specialist weapons have too little to do in their specialist roles, and so had better fulfil secondary ones than sit idle. This is the motivation for British 3.7" and US 90mm HAA being used in the ground role (no aircraft to shoot at), for tanks and tank destroyers firing indirect in the Italian campaign (where the terrain was unsuited to mechanized maneouvre), and for 17-pounder ATk guns to join in with HE in the fire support for the Rhine crossings (no tanks to shoot at). It became pretty much customary towards the end of the war in NWE for British arty commanders to gather a bunch of underemployed weapons capable of indirect fire into a "pepper-pot" to thicken up the fires of the conventional field artillery. As a final footnote to my ramblings, I have received a note by e-mail from someone called CROWBAR60, pointing out that 3.7" HAA were used for counter-bombardment (CB) tasks, where the use of airburst shells meant that craters and skip-burrows would not occur, making it harder for the enemy's CB staff to pinpoint the guns responsible. That makes sense, and is a further tactical advantage of HAA in the ground role that I hadn't thought of. All the best, John.

...and anyone who can't give the name of the platoon commander of 18 Pl is not worthy of full grogdom. Thanks for returning the thread to topics of some CM:BO relevance. I thought for one terrible moment that someone was going to try to explain the rules of cricket to Gyrene. :eek: All the best, John.

I'm reminded of the tourist walking along a street in Oxford, overtaking two dons deep in argument, and overhearing one of them say to the other "...and, eighthly..." Or, as Rudyard would put it: "Read here the moral roundly writ For him who into battle goes -- Each soul that hitting hard or hit, Endureth gross or ghostly foes. Prince, blown by many overthrows, Half blind with shame, half choked with dirt, Man cannot tell, but Allah knows, How much the other side was hurt!" Lord Wavell said in "Other Men's Flowers" (from where I copied the above verse) that the last two lines illustrated his "favourite military maxim, that when things are going badly in battle the best tonic is to take one's mind off one's own troubles by considering what a rotten time one's opponent must be having." All the best, John.

Right premise, wrong conclusion. All that means is that it is a gun, not a howitzer; guns are not precluded from firing indirect just because they don't have a charge system. They are, of course, more limited in their choice of trajectories, which is why they suffer more from crest restrictions. This is an error of fact. According to Hogg's "German Artillery of WW2" entry for the 8.8cm FlaK 18, 36 or 37: "Sighting was arranged for either gun or predictor control, with additional sights for use in the ground role... The ground shooting sight was the Rundblickfernrohr fur Flak, a typical dial sight..." That's a good point as far as it goes, but it doesn't prove a thing. Some of the tanks reported as Tigers were in fact Tigers, and I don't doubt that some indirect fire was conducted by 88s. Philip Toynbee's "The Distant Drum", sub-titled "Reflections on the Spanish Civil War", includes a piece called "The Blond Moors are Coming!" by Alfred Lent. He was a gunner in an 8.8cm FlaK battery in the Legion Kondor. It contains the following passage: "The long barrels of our guns are like pointers indicating the progress of the battle. The higher the elevation, the farther the enemy has been driven back. We should be closing up shop soon, as we always do at nightfall in this war. Our chief, with one lieutenant and a wireless crew, is still on his advanced observation post watching the heroic little 'Spaniacs' carrying their battle flags from one mountain top to the next. He corrects our fire from what he sees through a trench telescope. The adjustments made with a protractor on a survey chart are radioed back to the gun-layers. Our 'old' men remember how they once outgunned a howitzer behind hills, a dreaded adversary because of its steep trajectory." Now, I suppose it might be possible that German HAA gunners forgot how to do indirect shooting after the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that their US and UK opposite numbers had no such difficulty; but I very much doubt it. All the best, John.

All HAA weapons can do this to some extent (as, for that matter, can lots of tanks). The characteristics of HAA that you rightly identify, high velocity and availability of mechanical time (more reliable than pyro time) fuzes, give them their tactical characteristics. Disadvantages are that they are quite hard to range, especially for observation officers accustomed to howitzers; they are severely limited by crest restrictions, having a low trajectory and no charge system; and they have a very long 50% zone. Advantages are that they have a high rate of fire, produce reliable airbursts, and, as they arrive supersonically, may succeed in producing casualties among exposed personnel before they can take cover from surprise fire. Both British 3.7" and American 90mm HAA were, towards the end of the war, employed "in the ground role" for want of air targets. One of Ian Hogg's books recounts the incident where the commander of a 90mm gun in such a role during the Battle of the Bulge shot down a German fighter at low level with a single shot -- especially remarkable as the AA sights had been removed, the only known example of a kill by "AA in the ground role in the AA role", and I think a candidate for the luckiest shot of the war. There are some things you wouldn't dare allow in a simulation. All the best, John.

Was the main armour of any German tank face-hardened (FH) plate? I was under the impression that the basic armour was machineable-quality (MQ) homeogenous plate, with FH added on to the front. In those cases where additional armour was added, the armour thickness is 30 + 30mm, pretty much beyond the capability of the 45mm L46 at any angle or range whatever the armour type and ammunition nature used (OK, apart from APCR). As far as I can make out from Chamberlain & Ellis, the 30+30 frontal armour fit would have been pretty typical for Pz III Ausf F, G and H armed with the short 5cm gun. I'm not sure what fraction of Pz IIIs at the time of Barbarossa were still making do with the 3.7cm gun and 30mm armour, but I would guess that, as the upgrades of gun and armour seem to have been done together, armament fit would be a better guide to armour than would Ausfuhrung. The inadequacy of the British 2-pdr in North Africa is often attributed (as it was at the time) to the German use of face-hardened armour and the unavailability of capped shot prior to May 1942, but it seems to me that the effect would be largely irrelevant given the gun's inability to overmatch 60mm plate however arranged. For simulation purposes, ISTM that the important thing to model is that weapons like the 2-pdr, 37mm M6, 45mm L46 and 50mm L42 can't penetrate the noses of 30+30mm armnoured Pz IIIs at battle ranges. If there are sources indicating that the Soviet 45mm consistently had trouble getting through the _side_ plates of Pz IIIs or IVs, then that might indicate that amn quality is a problem. On the other hand, small-calibre (under 57mm, say) weapons are likely to have poor behind-armour effects after penetration, and the 2-pounder had a habit of shedding its tracer element, which gave the erroneous impression that successful penetrations had "bounced off". One might also suspect that with a fairly rapid-firing weapon, a gunner might put several shots into a target before it is seen to brew up or the crew bail-out, and so think that (say) it had taken three shots to get a penetration when in fact the first hit had been successful. By the way, is "APBC" an accepted abbreviation or a repeated typo? I've never seen it before, but I would assume that it indicates an AP round with a ballistic cap but no piercing cap. I'm not quite sure why one would need a ballistic cap alone unless the shape of the round was pretty odd. All the best, John.

As well as its obvious use against open-topped vehicles and guns, indirect fire can be useful against tanks and assault guns. I was immensely pleased when I bagged a Panther with a lucky 4.2" mortar hit; I've just completed a game against the AI that saw a Nashorn knocked out by 3" mortars; and if VT amn is available, it tears up open-topped vehicles in jig time. Even with a tank or assault-gun, tather than sit tight under a steady rain of exploding iron, the AFV's owner might (and the AI probably will) prefer to move rather than risk immobilization of a freak kill. If your tanks are positioned carefully, this might just chivvy him out to somewhere where you can get a flank shot. At all events, they will almost certainly close down, and that might give you a crucial edge in spotting when you come within sight of each other. Don't neglect on-table small-calibre mortars as a useful source of quick smoke. There's also the "Captain Mad" method. Use massed off-table smoke fire on a location you know the enemy AFVs to be -- this builds up a good thick cloud of smoke, as if the cu-nim had come down to feed -- and rush your tanks into it, trusting to superior numbers and faster turrets to get the flank and rear shots that will give you victory in the tank vs. tank battle. Assuming all your tanks don't get blatted by schrecks lurking in the smoke, of course. All the best, John.

Yeah, I think so. It would IMHO be stretching things a bit to want to see all the AFV types that we are quite sure *did* see combat in tiny numbers, such as the StuIG33B (24 built), 38cm Sturmmorser Tiger (18), 10.5cm Pz Sfl IVa, 12.8cm Pz Sfl V (2 each) or for the Sovs the SU-14-2 or SU-100Y (1 each). I suggest that anything produced in smaller numbers than the Jadgtiger (77) can probably be neglected; I would much rather have those common types that are still missing, such as the Daimler Dingo and the AEC and Staghound armoured cars. Of course, the reason for wanting a Maus is because it's a *BIG* frigging tank. If one is going to model BFTs that never saw combat, then I'd like to see such types as Tortoise (so I can blow the Maus to bits on the nose at a safe distance with 32-pdr APDS), Excelsior and the M-6 (which at least featured in German ID guides) and those that just missed the war like Centurion and IS-3. On the whole, though, I'd prefer BTS to focus its efforts on filling in as much historical coverage as possible before wandering off into fantasy aming. There are still the desert campaigns, Italy, the Pacific and Burma to cover in WW2. Once those are done I'd rather like to see the system exapnded to the Spanish Civil War, the Gran Chaco War, Korea and the Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistan wars. There's so much history to learn about, I don't see the need to invent things; but I expect there are some people who'd prefer an SF extension to let them fight lizardly aliens as per the Harry Turtledove books. All the best, John.

According to George Forty's "US Army Handbook" (I don't know where my second edition copy is, so I looked in the first, but I don't think it will have changed) three M7s (together with a couple of half-tracks and some ammunition trailers) appear in the assault gun platoon of a US Army armored infantry battalion. Since I think CM:BO players should fight in HC elements (HC here = "historically correct" -- like "politically-correct", but very slightly less whiney), three is a less gamey number of Priests to have than one or two. What might very well be considered "gamey" is the use of 25-pdr (SP or towed) artillery "on-table" in the direct-fire role. As far as I'm aware, no towed 25-pdr battery fought a direct-fire battle in the NW Europe campaign, indeed I believe none did after 155 Battery's last stand at Sidi Nsir with 5 Hampshires on 26 Feb 1943. The only time I have heard of 25-pdr SPs firing direct was at Villers-Bocage, where the record of amn expended in the war diary for Mercer's Troop shows that 1 (one) round of AP was fired, though it is not claimed to have hit anything. Anyway, the graphic for the towed 25-pounder bears no resemblance to the real appearance of this handsome and magnificent gun, so it's best not to use them on aesthetic grounds. All the best, John.

When I was in the TA I saw L4 Brens with date-stamps going back to 1943, and they still worked fine...and though it's not quite so old, there's something special about eating a Mars Bar from a ration pack that's dated four years before you were born... As you were so close at Pirbright, did you nip up the road (just past Deepcut, only a klick or two) to the Brookwood cemetery? It contains the Brookwood Memorial, bearing the names of all those killed on home service in WW2 with no known graves, which includes Violette Szabo, GC, as SOE service apparently counts as "home service" for this purpose. There is also the biggest plot of US war graves in the UK outside Madingley, mostly from WW1. All the best, John.

I have just had a moderately successful game against the AI (British attack vs. Heer, lost 41 cas, a Daimler and a 6-pdr, bagged 71 cas, 11 PWs, a Hetzer, a StuG III, 3 HTs and an assortment of 5 guns including a long 88). The only really unsatisfactory aspect of the fight was the heavy losses my infantry took from 120mm mortar DFs. This prompts the following question -- What is the best thing for attacking infantry to do under indirect fire: Advance out of it, or take cover? Historical advice on this seems variable. When I was in the TA, our training was largely defensive, but we would I think generally have expected to take cover under artillery fire and sit it out (in a tidy battle we would have been dug-in on a reverse slope). Tom Wintringham's "New Ways of War", published in 1940, advises sitting tight under bombardment in defence to the extent of not even thinking of moving until 50% casualties have been suffered, which seems a bit steely (although in defence, dug-in, I suspect that you're always going to be be worse off if you leave your slit trenches). On the other hand, and in attackign situations, an official booklet in my possession on infantry platoon and section leading (dated 1950, so presumably based closely on WW2 experience) says that it is often safer to double forward out of HE fire rather than take cover, and an OA document I dug up at the PRO reports experiments indicating that it might be better to spend fifteen seconds or so looking for the best cover before taking it under 25-pdr fire in rough heathland. Finally, there is the unforgettable passage in George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here" where the Borders "kept ga'n" under Japanese whizz-bang fire, and "the companies never stopped or even broke stride". It seems to me that the answer as to whether it's better to hit the deck or double forward will depend on the kind of terrain occupied (including how soggy it is) and the calibre of the incoming fire, and perhaps also the morale class of the people under fire -- green or conscript troops will probably hit the deck anyway. So -- what do people think? All the best, John.

This is not uniquely a Soviet practice. During WW1 all sides used what were then called "Battle Police", as mentioned in the section of Keegan's "Face of Battle" on the Somme. ISTR that Wintringham or Orwell or someone who fought in Spain with the International Brigades commented that the performance of the volunteers was especially good considering that there were no "battle police". Suvurov mentions NKVD "retreat-blocking detachments" in "Icebreaker", and although other aspects of that book have now I understand been refuted, I find it hard to imagine that this one has. According to Jack Radey's notes in his excellent "Black Sea, Black Death" boardgame, the German practice of having MGs offering "support to the rear" for potentially shaky allies was "Korsetstarken". All the best, John.

90mm Bofors? Dr. Grogsbollix McPicky hastens to point out that the 40mm Bofors was an LAA weapon with a rate of fire of about 120 rounds per minute and armour penetration broadly comparable to the 2-pounder. The US 90mm gun M1A1 or M2 on mount M1A1 or M2 was an HAA weapon with a rate of fire (hand-loading) of about 15 rds/min, and armour penetration with shot AP M77 of some 5.6inches (or, in millimetres, a whole bunch) at 500 yards. If you have somehow contrived to buy the genetically-engineered bastard son of these two weapons, capable of pentrating 140mm at 500 yds and firing 120 rounds per minute, then I shall be regretfully compelled to demand that the Houses of Parliament pass an act of attainder condemning you as gamier than a haunch of venison that has been left hanging for three months in a warm room. Yours, without prejudice, Hildegard Hauptkampflinie pp Dr. G. McPicky.

I rather like the system used in Arty Conliffe's "Crossfire"; for points, you buy just (say) "tanks", and a die-roll determines the specific type of tank you get. Something like this could I think be made to work pretty well in CM. You would buy a force as, say, 2 platoons of infantry, 4 support weapons, 2 ATk guns, an arty spotter and 3 medium tanks. "Medium tanks" might mean any of the types CM supports, weighted for rarity value, and all 3 would be of the same type (apart from having a Firefly every 3rd or 4th tank for the Brits, and a 75/76 gun mix for the USA). The problem with this, of course, would be that there would be a pretty strong element of luck in the forces you actually got -- the same points spent on 5 medium tanks might get you 5 Pz IVs or 5 Panthers, which ain't quite the same thing. Such a selection system could also enforce some unit compatibility rules -- you should never find Challengers in a Sherman squadron, for example, and the infantry accompanying Panzers should normally be Panzergrenadiers. One might also steal the WRG idea of "imbalance costs", whereby things cost extra if you try to buy an excessive proportion of them. All the best, John.

Marshall's specific proposition seems to be ill-formed, in that he does not appear to have collected the information that would justify such a conclusion. However, it is possible to reach a valid concluion despite faulty reasoning or invalid premises. "Men Against Fire" is still, considered a seminal work on individual motivation and group cohesion in infantry minor tactics. Marshall may have been vain and mendacious, but some of the things he said seem to be useful. There has been other work done on "fighter" and "non-fighter" personality types, and if only I could recall where I'd put down my copy of "War on the Mind" I would be able to give some second-hand references. It seems to match people's everyday experience if we say that we can divide people personalities that will actively take the initiative (fighters), those that will psychologiocally withdraw (non-fighters) and those that will go along with what the group is doing (and Milgram's famous experiments show that people will do some pretty terrible things because they are told to or because the group condones it). The specific question of a numerical "ratio of fire" is probably not very useful, although many wargamers, even professional ones, still seem to be happy to apply different "participation rates" to different troop types. As a measure of utilisation, it is of course not a measure of effectiveness. One of Marshall's persistent errors is to neglect the effect of terrain, which, in infantry minor tactics, one simply cannot do. Many soldiers might not fire because they never get a line-of-sight to a target; their not firing is no kind of "failure". Likewise, if a force commander can successfully complete an action without committing his reserve, the fact that the reserve did not fire cannot be accounted a "failure"; nor is it a bad thing if the riflemen can reserve their fire because the position they are assaulting can be taken at the walk, the enemy having fled or been eliminated by the preparatory bombardment. However, Marshall seems to have hit on something the military believe in identifying group conhesion and team-served weapons as important psychological elements (I believe the Germans had got a good handle on this before WW2, but couldn't name any publications). There seems no doubt that LMGs act as "nerveless rifles"; the phrase dates from WW1, so it is hardly a novel observation. Likewise, the USA WW2 practice of psychologically fragmenting the squad by having men fight from individual foxholes seems unquestionably to be a poor one. It contrasts markedly with the USMC (from the original Chinese) idea of organising men in psychologically tightly-bound fireteams each centred on an automatic weapon, which is now universally recognised as correct. Col. Tony Jeapes, based on his experience with the BATT (=SAS) in the Dhofar campaign, expressed a preference for 4-man over 2-man slit trenches, accepting the additional risk of losing half a section to a single lucky RPG or mortar round as a worthwhile price for the additional psychological bracing. So, the question isn't whether Marshall was right, the question is whether Marshall is useful; and I think he is. To that extent, his findings are valid, if not correct. All the best, John.

It is probably worth preserving the distinction between APCR, APCNR and APDS rounds rather than lumping them all together as "HVAP". Effectively, any round deployed by the USA during WW2 designated as HVAP was APCR. Yup, that's APCR, same as the German Panzergranate 40 and the Soviet podkaliberniy rounds. I believe that APCR rounds were produced for the 6-pounder and 17-pounder, but never used in action. An experimental APCR round for the Sherman's 75mm M3 was used experimentally, and penetration performance figures are given in Hunnicutt's "Sherman" which indicate that it would have had a slight edge in penetration over the 3-inch or 76mm guns firing APC. That would make the Sherman 75 a pretty fierce beast, but the commander of 22 Armoured Brigade after Villers-Bocage wanted an APDS round for the 75mm Mk V (the British equivalent of the M3). CM:BO players who like to play the Germans can presumably be glad that no such round was ever developed. Both pot and petal sabot were developed for the 6-pounder, and are illustrated in Bovington Tank Museum's "Fire and Movement" booklet. I was under the impression that all the amn issued for service was petal sabot, but can't recall seeing this stated anywhere. Do you have a source for the issue of pot sabot? I'd be interested in knowing where you heard or read that 6-pounder APDS was "regarded as a short-range round". OA papers I have seen at the PRO indicate that the maximum enagement range was advised as being 800 yards, but that was controlled by hit probability (and the pretty demanding criterion of a 50% chance of a first-round hit) and no different for APDS or APCBC. I understand that early 17-pounder sabot had some accuracy problems, but have never heard so for other APDS rounds. All the best, John.

I'm afraid I cannot recall or track down the thread this question was originally raised in, so apologies for kicking off a new one. My shubunkin-like memory tells me that people were discussing the effect of deep snow on artillery fire. I found my copy of FM31-70/CATP 9-1, "Basic Artic Manual", dated October 1951 (I rather hope the "restricted" marking no longer applies, especially as I bought it from a market stall years ago). It has the following to say on the subject (paras 142 and 143, pages 226 to 228): "142. STRENGTH OF SNOW, ICE AND FROZEN GROUND FOR COVER. a. General. The often soft spongy ground of the north in the summer and the snow surface in the winter has a smothering effect on all types of fire. However hard frozen bare ground or ice when not covered with snow greatly increases the numbers of ricochets and fragmentation effects. The resistance or protection offered by snow, ice, or frozen ground against enemy fire is most variable. b. Penetration table. The minimum thickness for protection from rifle bullets and shell splinters is as follows: Snow-wall material(*) Minimum thickness in feet Newly fallen snow_______________13. Firmly frozen snow______________8 to 10. Packed snow___________________6 1/2. Frozen snow-water mixture_______4 to 5. Ice___________________________3 1/2. Icecrete________________________1. * These materials will disintegrate under sustained fire. A rifle bullet fired from 100 yards loses its killing power in unpacked snow, after penetrating 3 to 6 feet depending on the type of snow. Snow packed in layers tends to deflect the bullet at each new layer. Loose snow spread over a defense position will help smother ricochets. 143. EFFECT OF SNOW, ICE, FROZEN GROUND AND MUSKEG ON SHELLS AND GRENADES. a. Loose snow greatly reduces the explosive power and splinter effect of shells. The depth, type of snow, and ammunition are naturally the main considerations. On a quick or delayed action fuse the shell generally penetrates the snow blanket and explodes on hitting the solid ground. The snow smothers and reduces the effect of the fragments. Your cover of 3 feet of snow will provide protection against most light artillery fire except in case of a direct hit. A superquick fuse setting will increase the ffect of artillery fire, while air burst will inflict still more casualties on surface targets. b. In the summer the many areas of muskeg and water will also limit the effects of artillery fire. On ice or frozen ground and during periods of freeze-up the effect will be greatly increased as the result of flying ice splinters and frozen clods of ground. In these seasons and areas your immediate material for protection must be increased in strength. Overhead protection must be sought wherever possible. c. Hand grenades often sink into the snow and muskeg before exploding and are consequently restricted in effect. In such conditions the grenade can be tied to an improvised platform which will help prevent sinking into the snow or muskeg before it explodes (fig. 109). You must accept the fact that a platform and the use of heavy mitts will lower your accuracy and throwing range." I also seem to recall reading somewhere that snow reduces the effect of VT-fuzed arty rounds, as the increased strength of return from the snow sets off the rounds at a higher altitude than is best. However, I can't remember where I read that, and so can't quote the source. All the best, John.

HE is boring. Give us flame; give us that neat little Einstossflammenwerfer, or whatever it was called.

Heheheheheh. Can open, worms everywhere. ISTM that CM:BO concentrates, not unreasonably, on fairly-mobile warfare in the fairly-open countryside. This is traditional in wargames; it's more fun that slogging through belts of concrete fortifications or mouseholing from house to house, which is more like seige warfare. To be fair I think it's also by far the more common mode of warfare in the NW Europe campaign; I don't think there was very much in the way of large-scale FISH (Fighting In Someone's House -- a much nicer term that FIBUA, OBUA or MOUT); Aachen and Oosterbeek spring to mind, but not much really comparable with Stalingrad, Cassino or Ortona. Likewise, fighting through elaborate fortifications was a rarity, occurring only really during the intial invasion (and tidying-up battles like Cherbourg and ) and around Metz and Walcheren. So one can argue that leaving FISH and fortifications largely out of consideration is not unreasonable -- certainly no more unreasonable than, say, omitting amphibious vehicles, which one really needs only for the Rhine crossings, Walcheren and the Reichswald battles. And yet -- it would be nice to have more elaborate constructions. Even simple field entrenchments might be more elaborate than the slit-trenches modelled in CM:BO; it doesn't take much in the way of engineer stores to produce overhead cover giving you pretty good protection against medium mortars and field artillery (and *why* can't I follow gunner tradition and put my OPs in church spires, eh?). If you've got a house, you can make yourself really cosy given time to prepare it for defence -- demolish the stairs and replace them with ropes so that the bad guys can't get to the upper floor, keep the bath filled with water so you can fight fires, turn the cellar into a deep shelter. You can even do what the Canadians did at Ortona and remove the back wall of a row of houses, so that the Fallshirmjager entering what they thought was an intact house are left facing a space where the wall was and the muzzle of a previously-emplaced 17-pounder. Concrete-and-steel fortifications would be even more fun. Certainly a subterranean terrain editing option would be needed in the map editor if one was to produce the intricate interconnected galleries of strongpoints like Morris and Hillman. This sort of thing also gives more point to "funnies" like the AVRE and Crocodile (and I'd really like to be able to drop fascines in anti-tank ditches or drive Churchill ARKs into them, too). Let's face it, CM is going to need to handle subterranean features if it's going to tackle the Japanese in the fullness of time, so may as well bite the bullet now... (The question of demolishing constructions with HE, by the way, really depends a lot on fuzing. I'd like to see the difference between superquick and delayed action modelled, and let people try things like ricochet fire. But have you ever heard of any set of wargames rules in any medium that attempts this at all, never mind does it accurately? Me neither.) Modelling all this (I'm deliberately not thinking about how much work this will take) will give more point to the engineers, and, who knows, maybe even make flamethrowers useful. And, while we're doing the engineer stuff properly, why not model demolitions (I find a game based on a demolition guard is normally good fun -- get your people back over the bridge, then blow it), and give use a proper selection of different kinds of mines and wire (triple-roll Dannert in the open, low entanglements for the bushes). I'd be prepared to wait three years and pay $100 for the resulting game if it did all that lot well. But would anybody else? All the best, John.

It's not much more than speculation, but my dear old Jane's Infantry Weapons for 1975 says that the SG-43 does not have a dial sight. This would presumably mean that it could not be used for indirect fire, or given multiple Defensive Fire (DF) tasks in a defensive layout, as the Vickers or sMG-42 could (the Vickers, with the Mk 9Z boat-tailed bullet, could and did deliver area fire up to 4,500 yards). If Soviet MGs were used only for direct fire, this would seem to conform to the stereotype of the Red Army preferring simple methods. Mind you, I can think of only one wargame I've ever met that allows for indirect MG fire, so I doubt that any such difference would show up in CM:BB. Come to think of it, were American MGs after the M1917 equipped for indirect fire? All the best, John.

Maths won't help all that much. You can mess around with cosines if you like, and indeed that's a pretty good way to do things for HEAT rounds and modern long-rod penetrators. For WW2 vintage AP (yes, yes, and APC, APCBC, APHE, APCR, APCNR and APDS) rounds you will probably do better to use the table I include here(text formatting permitting), which is what was used by the US and UK at the time: slope multiplier 10º 1.01 15º 1.03 20º 1.08 25º 1.15 30º 1.25 35º 1.37 40º 1.52 45º 1.69 50º 1.89 55º 2.13 60º 2.5 This is adapted from PRO document WO 185/118, "DDG/FV(D) Armour plate experiments". The values are read from an American armour basis curve, which it was suggested be adopted as an agreed standard as it did not differ greatly from that previously used in Britain. I hope it's obvious enough how to use the table. To find, say, the equivalent of 45mm of armour sloped at 60 degrees (as on the glacis of a T-34) multiply the plate thickness by the multiplier for 60 degrees -- so, 45 x 2.5 = 113mm. This adheres to the WW2 Anglo-American convention of citing the angle from the vertical, not the WW2 German and modern NATO convention of angle from the horizontal. Notice that the benefits of slope get better than a plain cosine rule would indicate as slope increases; using a cosine rule, the T-34 glacis would be worth only 90mm. The document I took the figures from also contains the following cautions about using armour basis curves: "It is considered, however, that the facts are too complex to be represented even approximately by any single armour basis curve, and, as illustrated in figures I to V, the armour basis curve varies widely according to the type of projectile and plate attacked." "...in the case of the 6pdr the armour basis curve is wrong by 7% and in the case of the 2pdr wrong by 28%." The "too complex" facts include armour and projectile quality and hardness, the effects of piercing caps, and a whole bunch of stuff that I believe CM:BO probably deals with rather better than was possible even for research establishments during WW2. All the best, John.

The main Soviet MGs in each role during the Great Patriotic War were: The DP (Degtyarev) was the standard LMG, equivalent to the Bren, ZB or Chatellerault. A good gun, with a large-capacity drum mag; lots of Soviet sections would carry two of them, especially late in the war. A shortage of DPs meant that sometime a DT (the Degtyarev model intended for use in tanks) would sometimes be used as a substitute. The MMG might be, especially early in the war, the trusty PM-10 (Maksim); hefty on its cumbersome wheeled carriage and maybe shield, but, like the other water-cooled weapons of its vintage (Vickers, MG-08, Browning M1917) superbly reliable and capable of putting out large volumes of fire for protracted periods. Later in the war it was increasingly replaced by the SG-43 (Goryunov), an air-coooled weapon that was, again, a bit heavier than its foreign equivalents and mounted on a wheeled carriage. Finally, the HMG would be the DShK (Shpagin), or "Dushka". This weapon has a reputation comparable to the Ma Deuce; it was still a favourite with the Muj in Afghanistan in the 1980s for use against Soviet helos. It also commanded the repect of the SAS during the Dhofar campaign (Ran Fiennes reports a pal of his saying "Jeez, man, they've got Shpagins!" on discovering that the Adoo were using them). Again, a bit on the heavy side, and a wheeled carriage. I'm not aware of anything especially distinctive about the way the Sovs used their MGs, other than the strange fondness for trundling MMGs and HMGs around on wheels. In common with most European countries, the section weapon was a single-role LMG, not a GPMG as with the Germans nor a not-sure-what-I-am weapon like the BAR, although early in the war AVTs (Tokarev automatic rifles) might have been used as substitutes or supplements to the DP. As with so many other things, the Sov attitude to MGs seems to have been that you need lots of them; at full strength, a standard infantry company might field 18 LMGs and an MMG, and the battalion would have its own MMG company with 3 platoons each of 3 MMGs. That gives a battalion total of 54 LMGs and 12 MMGs, which is pretty respectable; they didn't stint on mortar firepower, either. Zaloga & Ness' "Red Army Handbook" gives detailed TOEs for Soviet units throughout the war. All the best, John.

It was certainly an approved method of dealing with slit trenches and anti-tank guns (once you've run over the trails of an ATk gun with a great big clanky tank, aiming the thing can become a bit of a problem). There are two sets of circumstances where I think this method might be important. One is for whichever version of CM deals with the Western Desert battles; British tanks not issued with HE might find it far the easiest way of physically destroying an ATk gun (although of course in CM as it stands it doesn;t matter, as the detachment, having once left the gun, will never return). There is also a written account (in Moorehead's "African Trilogy" IIRC?) of German tanks attempting to do this to Australian infantry in slitters in the Tobruk perimeter. The other circumstance is in night combat. CM:BO seems to assume that there is always "fighting light" at night-time. However, on dark nights or in thick smoke, it is not possible to use the sighting telescope on a tank's gun. A PRO document (whose number I can't be bothered to look up unless asked) on smoke fog trials suggested that if tanks could get close enough to ATk guns in smoke they could overrun them before they could get a shot off. Finally, the method might have more value if CB were not very generous to tanks in close combat with infantry (there seems to be no appreciable "dead zone" to observation around a tank), and if it were not possible to eliminate personnel in bulletproof cover by machine-gunning them. If the mecahnism to do this is implemented, bear in mind that destruction of a slit-trench by driving a tank over it is not automatic. All the best, John.

Better just whip it out and take another peek (I'm guessing the page layout on p. 38 of Chamberlain, Doyle and Jentz has misled you). It's a Pz Sf 1 fur 7.62cm PaK36® auf Fgstl PzKw II Ausf D1 und D2. The Sd Kfz number is indeed 132 but the weapon is the captured Soviet 76.2mm, not the PaK 40. 201 converted from Apr 1942 to Jun 1943. I tend to call this beastie by the short name LaS 76.2, reserving "Marder II" for the Sd Kfz 131. Chamberlain, Doyle & Jentz do not give Marder II an alternative designation for the Sd Kfz 132, but it was referred to as Marder II in Chamberlain & Ellis' previous "Panzerjager". All the best, John.