John D Salt

I confess that I'm a little baffled by this discussion, partly I suspect because of the unfamiliar terminology. "Grazing fire" seems to be being used oddly in this thread; "Fire lanes" I take to mean "fire on fixed lines", and "penetration" to mean "enfilade" (this might be a difference between UK and US terms, but I think it's between MG and SL terms). Drawing lines through patterns of dots is all very well, but neglects the fact that, under MG fire, I would expect most men in the section to be prone and taking cover, with only (say) two men up and moving at any instant. "Grazing fire", in the sense of fire passing within a metre or so of the ground, may well have no physical effect at all on the men taking cover (although I understand that bullets going over your head always seem much lower than they really are). A machine-gunner who is really determined to do damage to people will not put them in his gun's dangerous area, but in the gun's beaten zone. Here, rounds are actually hitting the ground, and so everyone in the target section is liable to be hit if they are not protected by bulletproof cover. At the ranges seen in CM:BO, and neglecting variations due to irregular terrain, it is probably fair to assume that the dangerous area of grazing fire extends from the muzzle to the start of the beaten zone. The beaten zone itself will be very long and narrow, and the enfilade effect quite capable of covering more than one section. All the best, John.

As a quick-and-dirty rule of thumb, armour platoons/troops are five tanks for US-style organisations, three or four for British-style, and three, four or five for German ones. All vehicles in a tank platoon should be the same type (if not necessarily mark) except that one can mix US 75mm and 76mm Shermans ad lib, and in British cruiser tank troops, the fourth ("Charlie") tank is likely to be a Firefly; alternatively the squadron may have centralised the Fireflies into a troop of their own. Late in the war, up to 50% Fireflies might be available. Towed artillery comes in batteries or troops of four guns, Allied armoured cars in pairs (with three jeeps for a US cavalry platoon or scout cars for a British recce troop) and German ones in threes. All the best, John.

I think you might want to be a bit careful with the 6/6 hindsight binoculars, there. I'd be intereted to know what your source is for evidence that Wittman's Tiger took two hits in the turret side. I understand that the farmer who owned the field where what was believed to be hist Tiger lay for years claimed that no penetrations were visible. I'm not too sure about the "rookie mistake" and lacking patience, either. The ground in front of St Aignan does not really allow much scope for tactical cleverness, being essentially bare hillside. Support form the right flank would have been problematic, as a small wooded valley divides the battlefield lengthwise (with respect to the opposing forces). I'd also like to know your source for the Germans knowing the Brits were there the night before; Ken Tout's account in "Tanks, Advance!" has 1NY arriving in St-Aignan at about dawn that day. All the best, John.

Now this raises a point I've been meaning to raise myself. What is it with these seven-stone weaklings in CM:BO who can't keep up with the rest of the platoon because they're carrying an FT, a 2-inch mortar, an MG or an anti-tank weapon? I am no athlete, and never was, but I know well fine that in my youth I could sprint with 40 Kg (88 lbs) of kit (CEFO, GPMG and 600 rounds of belted blank). In those days (late 1970s and early 1980s) the standard weight for a rifleman in CEFO (Combat Equipment Fighting Order) was 72 lbs; the 84mm and GPMG teams carried more, but were expected to keep up with the rest of the section. Do a section attack in that lot wearing a respirator and you'll be panting by the end of it, but you will not, if my experience and that of tens of thousands of others is anything to go by, slow down appreciably while some f***er is shooting at you, even for exercise. I accept that the mass armies of WW2 were "semi-professional" at best, but I doubt that the essentially amateur mob I was a member of (the Territorial Army and UOTC) were any fitter, by and large, than the average chap from the 1940s who had led a more outdoorsy life than we tend to nowadays. I have personally carried a 2-inch mortar of the type modelled in CM:BO on exercise (it was still in service in THE 1980S), and the idea that it and a few rounds of ammo would slow me down is laughable. I have handled a PIAT, and it is an awkward beast (encumbrance arises not so much from weight as the way it is arranged), but given a webbing strap and a number 2 I'm sure the lads would have covered the ground no slower than the 84mm Charlie G we sometimes exercised with. And it seems to me silly that the German LMG teams are slower than German squads, which are carrying the exact same MG, sometimes two of them. Make all weapons in a platoon move at the same speed, the way they do in real life. All the best, John.

One way to get to an answer, traditional to programmers, is to add a level of indirection (I don't know who said "All programming problems can be solved by adding a level of indirection", but I know someone who does). The ultimate answer -- to life, integral flamethrower teams and everything -- is to give the players a taskorg/TOE editor, so that they can assign weapons and soldiers as they wish to teams/sections/squads/platoons in a proper hierarchical fashion. This could be used to model the sub-section level of organisation that CM:BO misses out; squads are not really made of "half-squads", but of gun group and rifle group (British or German stlye) or Able, Baker and Charlie teams (US style). A British platoon is nominally three sections, the platoon commander's group and platoon serjeant's group (with 2-in mortar). However, it probably fights as a fire group, under the serjeant with all the brens and the 2-in mortar, and an assault group, under the subaltern with the bulk of the riflemen. Or maybe the 2-in mortar and some Brens have been snaffled by the CSM for a company "pepper-pot". These things happened. A suitable editor would let the player construct the taskorg he wished, under any of these schemes or his own. Integral or separate FTs is then left as an exercise for the reader. Such a hierarchical taskorg could be made part of the command system, too. At the moment, players can conveniently give orders to infantry platoons by clicking on their command element. Why not let them give commands at any hierarchical level they wish? "A Coy, advance to that hill, 8 platoon stand fast, I've got another job for you". Re-squadding during play should be possible, but incurring a morale penalty. For even more fun, the disorganising effects of fire could be shown by making individuals take cover on their own, splitting off from the specified taskorg, so that the owning player does not immediately get an accurate count of friendly casualties, but has to wait until the section (or whatever) is reorged and a casualty check conducted before he knows. Such a mechanism could well reflect the real differences between green and veteran troops, as discussed elsewhere on this forum; veterans know to take cover under effective fire, and so are easily stopped, but re-organise quickly to have another go; fresh green soldiers bash on regardless, perhaps carrying all before them, probably suffering heavy casualties as a result, but once they have gone to ground those that are left take a long, long time to get moving again. Reorgs over multiple turns, offering a chance of "lost" soldiers re-joining each turn if they are not incapacitated, would both offer an irritating puzzle to the owning player (press on with the guys we have, or wait another couple of minutes?) and present the possibility of a "missing in action" category on the AARs for those men not re-joined by the end of the game. Now, about these ideas I've got for modelling the social structure of infantry units by creating a weighted directed graph showing who is mates with who... [i won't complain if I have to wait for CM 5 for these...] All the best, John.

The one time so far I've used VT in a game, it destroyed a house pretty quickly. Not quite right, I think; unless there are an awful lot more fuze malfunctions than there should be, VT (or any kind of airburst) would be almost completely ineffective against roofed structures. Another of the things I'd like to see in the game (and it occurs to me I've not yet mentioned that it is without a doubt the best computer wargame I've met -- I have a big "thank you" letter to the production team in the works) is a more convincing representation of artillery, including, among other things, treatment of groundbursts, treebursts (with superquick fuzes) and airbursts (most reliably obtained with VT, but also by pyrotechnic or clockwork time fuzes, ricochet fire, or the odd "bouncing bomb" from the German 8cm mortar (apart from which rocket and mortar fuzing is usually quite dull). Pointless trivia: I believe that snow-covered ground caused WW2 VT fuzes to burst higher than they usually would, lessening their lethality. All the best, John.

No, to judge by the penetration performance figures. If they were, the German player would have the additional annoyance of the beasties having anti-tank capabilities comparable with a 6-pounder. The Daimler was an extremely good car -- it continued in service IIRC until 1960. All the best, John.

Close enough for government work -- 81mm, same-same like everyone else's bar the Russians. Despite the miserable range figures typically given in weapons books, the 3-inch was no worse than the German 8cm in this respect if you simply put in more increments than the official top service charge (according to a paper reporting a comparative shoot-off between the two by the Small Arms School). All the best, John.

Those are reasonable, nay generous, limits for average sorts of units on a typical sort of day, certainly for number of observers. The problem, of course, is that in real life the number of observers and number of rounds are independent of each other (especially in the British Army, where an FO could call on thickening fires with a remarkable degree of flexibility if necessary -- "Mike", "Uncle", "Victor", and, if you really annoy someone, "William" targets for fire mission regiment, division, corps and army respectively). ISTR reading in an old copy of the "British Army Review" (many years ago, so I regret I can't find a better citation) that battalions of the British Liberation Army in the Netherlands developed a tactic known as the "Javelin" attack. This relied on massed fires to be effective; a single battalion would attack with the fire resources of the entire division (which might include an element of Corps artillery). The mortar platoons would be collected from the other battalions of the division to support the attacking battalion; by my reckoning that makes 9 x 6 = 54 3-inch mortar tubes (trivia quiz question: What's the calibre of a 3-inch mortar in millimetres?). The normal arty support for an infantry brigade would be a field regiment of 25-pdr (25-pdr or 25-pr, please; never, ever "25-lber"), 3 batteries of 8 tubes each for a total of 24 tubes; three brigades in the div makes 72 tubes. The divisional MG battalion would typically have a company of 4.2" mortars to contribute (4 platoons each of 4 tubes). Corps might chip in a regiment of 5.5"s (2 batteries each of 4 tubes), say, giving us a grand total of: 54 3-inch mortars 72 25-pdr gun-hows 16 4.2" mortars 8 5.5" gun-hows This is not including the possibility of a "pepper-pot" of underemployed Bofors, 3.7" AA or 17-pdr ATk guns being added in. Not bad fire support for a battalion, though, eh? In CM:BO terms I make it 13 modules of 3-in mor, 18 modules of 25-pdr, 4 modules of 4.2" and 2 of 5.5" (so, yes, 3 modules of 4.2" does have a distinctly overripe gamey flavour). Of course, the best way to simulate this in CM:BO would be to have a fresh battalion advance over a moonscape of craters inhabited by the odd panicked and broken half-squad, which might not make much of a game. But the assumption that the Americans should have more fire support than anyone else is, I think, questionable. All the best, John.

Lots of good points made so far. I am tempted to make some bold and silly claim along the lines of "the history of the development of tactical wargames is the history of attempts to get the Germans to beat the Russians in 1941". ISTM that various mechanisms (apart from straight fiddling the numbers, a tradition since Panzerblitz days) have been tried to confer that German edge: * German tanks have "better optics", so their hit probabilities are greater (red "to hit" numbers in SL). * Penalties for two-man turrets (WRG 1925-50 rules), which Russian designs have more often. * Higher troop quality ratings for Germans (any game that allows for troop quality, starting with the old SPI "panic" system from the 1970s). * More and better German leaders (SL again). * "Soviet doctrine" rules effectively making idiocy compulsory for the Russians (more popular in Cold War games than WW2). * Some scheme of activation rolls ("Iron Cross"), chits ("Panzer Commander") or cards ("East Front Tank Leader") that essentially allow the Germans to get more done in a game-turn. There is some truth in all of these, but in the end the problem is going to come down to one of modelling command & control. The last three bullets are all attempts at doing so. The effect of having AFVs that are not equipped with two-way radio is also impossible to model adequately unless there is some recognition of what is being transmitted by those radios, namely, command and control information. In the absence of radios, this must either be prearranged and impossible to change at execution time, or must be passed by waving flags -- I would really, really like to see Soviet tanks in CM:BB have animated commanders flag-wagging out of their turrets, while their subordinates peer through the smoke and fail to notice the Pz III creeping up on them, or the sniper lining up on the flag-wagger. ISTM that mechanisms already exist to model the LOS needed for visual signalling, the effect of concentrating attention in one direction, and the effect of losing an AFV commander. It seems likely that Combat Mission also has the ability to model the reduced spotting capability of Soviet AFVs with relatively poor crew vision arrangements. Another Soviet weakness that I'm not sure how to model was their absolutely wretched march security at the beginning of the war (and, at levels where radios were common, poor electronic security). The mechanism of command delays mentioned is obviously an attempt to model relative command & control advantages using the exisitng game mechanisms for giving orders. The trouble is, of course, that giving commands in CM bears very little resemblance to giving commands in a real tactical sub-unit. Unless one wishes to get into an entirely new approach to command & control modelling (which, incidentally, is still not at all well done by "professional" wargamers working for government research establishments), this is probably the best that can be done. And one can always console oneself with the good point, made earlier, that Soviet defeats arose primarily from the Wehrmacht's operational, rather than tactical, advantage over the Red Army. Dare I hope that we'll be getting Cossacks, aerosans, ski mines, ice mines, punishment battalions? Me, I fancy one of those horse-drawn quad Maxim AA wagons... All the best, John.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by redwolf: The Daimler has no HE at all, not even grenade. <hr></blockquote> Having checked this in the scenario designer, I have to ask why? 2-pounder tank guns may not have carried HE in the Western Desert, but 2-pdr HE was issued to armoured car units in NW Europe. The inability to fire HE with the Littlejohn adapter fitted to the 2-pdr was a fact that counted against it. I understand that the commanders of some cars left the Littlejohn adapter off and fired the APCNR rounds without it; it still gave improved penetration in this "improvised APCR" mode, although obviously not as good as with the adapter. I believe there was also a version of the Littlejohn adapter for the US 37mm, but I don;t know how widely it was used by the US Army. All the best, John.

While there have been a number of conflicting claims as to who bagged Wittman, ISTM that the claim by 1 NY (as mentioned by Dr. Tout) is considerably better researched and more authoritative than any other. Wittman's grave (together with his crewmen) was discovered only a few years ago, and its location lends credence to the 1 NY claim. Touring the Normandy battlefields with a group of friends, I have visited three Wittman-related sites in successive years; first, Villers-Bocage, site of his most famous battle; second, the slope below St-Aignan-le-Cramesnil where he was killed by a 1 NY Firefly; and finally his last resting place at La Cambe cemetery. All the best, John.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by redwolf: Not only has the Shermans round more HE value, but CMBO does have a more complex HE explosion model than the single value implies. Please see the parallel Axis gun thread for a posting of mine. If you want to know you real HE capability, you better test-play a lot, the effects for dring people out of foxholes and knockout down buildings may vary greatly, for the same "blast value" summary value. BTW, the 57mm guns are a little too well-loved here for my taste. Besides the undoubted mobility advantage, I think most of the love comes from the CMBO price, which is a very subjective and random thing with regards to reality. In real life a lot of people died because of inadaequate AT capablities of infantry divisions, to a point where it is not funnay anymore. And as said, it is sad that the US, after kinda correcting the 6 pdr error by using the semi-long 75mm which could at least do some substancial damage to soft and thin hard targets, immedeately went on repeating the British error on the next level for their tank hunter gun.<hr></blockquote> I hardly think the 6-pounder can be classed as an "error". If CM:BO shows it as a very good lightweight tank-killer, that seems a pretty good representation of the gun to me. Apart from anything else, an infantry anti-tank gun has to be light enough to manhandle; I really wouldn't fancy digging a gun pit for a 17-pounder. The big difference between the reputation the gun earned in US service ("impuissant" is one description I've heard) and British is, obviously, the issue of APDS. In British service this was standard from D-Day on, and it makes the little gun a cat-killer. The USA, on the other hand, (I believe this is mentioned in Vannoy & Karameles' "Against the Panzers) made a one-time issue of ten rounds per gun, making it scarcer that rocking-horse dung. Now, a toy I'd like to see in CM:BO would be a Churchill IX -- a Churchill IV re-armoured to VII standards, but keeping the original 6-pounder. With sabot rounds, that should be able to slug it out with Panthers or Tigers on even terms. All the best, John.

One particular place where small-arms should certainly be included as crew weapons is for the Vickers MMG in British service. I have never heard of this weapon being issued on any basis other than to MG battalions (one per division, which of shared around evenly gives an MMG coy per brigade, and, fairly obviously, a platoon per battalion). A Vickers MMG platoon consists of four sections, each of 10 men. This section is really just like an ordinary rifle section, except that the Bren is replaced by a Vickers. Most men in the section are armed with rifles. All the best, John.