TN

I went through the tutorial walkthroughs, and I was surprised by the heavy use of captured weapons. There was a mention that you need suitably skilled soldiers to man and operate captured enemy guns and vehicles, but I wonder what the average skill level of soldiers will be in the game. You could end up with something grossly unrealistic, if even an entire infantry platoon contains enough skills to man an enemy tank. Average Russian (or almost any other army's) WWII groundpounder could probably figure out how to use captured light infantry weapons, even automatic ones. Heavier weaponry, such as AT guns would be much harder, and combat vehicles such as tanks really need a skilled crew of "tankists" to drive and shoot them. Russians couldn't even read the gauges and switches of German tanks, and vice versa. And what's the deal with artillery support and CAS? No way a Russian squad leader could order an artillery strike to immediately pulverize the opposing positions. Pre-registered was the name of the game for most of WWII for all armies and all theatres. Otherwise, delays would inevitably occur before any shells would arrive.

I have nothing but respect for the person who maintains Moisin-Nagant.net site and its Finnish pages, and they are usually quite accurate. But I must say that in all pictures of Finnish soldiers in WWII that I've seen over the years in Finland I'd never seen a helmet with emblems painted on it. I first ran into one on the KevOs 4 re-enactor page. Must go and check the Cavalry Museum next summer. Anyway, I just would like to point out that the use of any unit insignia on uniforms was pretty strongly disapproved in the Finnish Army during the war. They were used locally, depending on the commander, but I don't believe they were as ubiquitous as the Big Red One or the Screaming Eagle shoulder patches for example. I think the insignia of the Finnish Armored Division (three arrows pointing left in a green field) was the first one to receive any kind of semi-official status or approval. After the war these emblems have been used much more in commemorative medals, veterans gatherings, books and so on. So if you do Finnish uniform mods, the realistic way would be to steer clear of anything that has a very flashy image like skulls etc.. Un-Finnish, IMHO... Some images of what Finnish divisional emblems looked like can be found from http://users.skynet.be/hendrik/eng/Fin-Comm3.html

Actually, those green collar patches with silver trim are regular infantry. Jääkäri / jaeger / light infantry collar patches are green with gold trim. Most of the wartime photos are naturally B/W, but from them I have the impression that a lot of front-line officers wore their rang insignia directly on the grey cloth. Inconspicuity is longevity in battle !

I think that Steve's information should be correct. Separate Sissi battallions fighting as infantry were pretty much a Winter War / early Continuation War feature. I don't remember seeing any references to them late in the war, so I'm ready to believe they were indeed disbanded. SMGs were also becoming more widespread in regular infantry units by then. However, the recon activities did obviously not cease. There were dedicated long-range recon units that were directly under the Finnish supreme HQ (Osasto Kuismanen and Osasto Vehniäinen, later consolidated into an independent battallion Er.P.4). Additionally, there were patrolling units on division, regiment and battallion level. For example, there might be a Jaeger / Jääkäri company in a regiment and a jääkäri platoon in a battallion that would be used as recon/patrol/shock troop and COs last counterattack reserve. Understanding all this is complicated, because the organisation seems to have left a lot of leeway to individual commanders on how they organised and used their units, depending on their abilities and temperament. One famous regimental commander collected the best warriors of the regiment into his HQ supply platoon that in many other units was a collection of sad sacks. That way, he had a reliable strike reserve close at hand...

Hey, how about those Soviet anti-tank dogs that had explosive packs on their backs and had been taught to look for food under tanks ? I think they should be modeled in the next version of the game engine. Complete with different breeds of dogs that have different payloads and speeds, and of course different hit probabilities.

Excellent post that brought something new into the discussion. Now the Finns just hunker down to withstand the inevitable counterbattery fire

Here's another link to an article that compares different schools and doctrines of artillery thinking. Please note that the author wrote it without notes, and make sure you read the correction at the end when you read the part about U.S. artillery. And I believe every nation did their ballistic homework (weather, wind, gun characteristics, charge variables like temperature etc.) well, and not only the Americans. At least the Finns had their tables for calculating a firing solution in every conceivable situation. http://www.combatmission.com/articles/Arty/arty.asp The article's focus on impromptu fires is spot-on, because walking artillery fire up to the target is usually relatively fruitless since the target can move or take cover. (Unless the situation is like in one memoir I've read, where the target was a Chinese bunker in Korea and the firing unit was a battleship 30 miles away ) This is especially true in WWII situations, where the artillery could be quite small-bore (75-105 mm). The goal for the Finnish FOs has always been always that calling fires should be "target coordinates, battery, one round - left 100, add 200, fire for effect". Accurate TOT fire without any preceding corrections is the Holy Grail of redlegs everywhere. (And in modern aside, this is what many current weapon systems can do, even when the number of weapons is limited. The new Finnish-Swedish joint effort AMOS (Advanced MOrtar System) can drop six rounds on a target simultaneously from a two-barreled turret). What interests me in this discussion is to determine if there were in WWII significant performance differences between armies in terms of speed and time consumption when placing impromptu artillery fires on targets, when all situational factors are constant except artillery and observation SOPs, and if so, why ? rgds, TN P.S. If we invite a Finn to join this thread, then I suggest colonel (ret.) Matti Koskimaa rather than Linus

Finally, I received my password so that I can participate in the conversation ! I read the whole thread with great interest, and was truly blown away by the level of conversation on this forum. Oddly enough, I don’t have the game yet and the demo graphics don’t work at all on my laptop (CMBO demo works fine). Therefore, I’d like to limit my remarks to some historical details that have been discussed in this thread.