Ivan_996

That would be logical but there is the human element. It makes perfect sense to defend when someone is attacking you, just as you quote. But Battlefront scenario designers must have read enough historical accounts to know that both sides did not have the luxury to even make a hasty defense when being menanced by a sinister dictator.

The meeting engagement was actually very common during WWII on the East Front, but you have to take it in context. Armored pincers were, if they didn't run out of supplies first, best handled by similiar armored forces. Some of the most critical battles on the East Front were meeting engagements where an armored column was defeated or victorious before reaching the second pincer and thereby encircling enemy forces. This is what made Hitler's "no retreat" orders extremely dangerous to German forces. Not the actual retreat order itself...German infanty after 1943 was far too immobile to even disengage...but within the order was a mandate that said any counterattacks had first to be approved by Hitler first. This often meant that German forces had to fight through a ring of entrenched Russians who had encircled a couple of divisions.

Oh, they happened very very often. All the time, as a matter of fact. Follow any of the mechanised or motorised divisions and you will see they were constantly in battle against AFVs. Their losses in AFVs were huge, although, strangely enough, not so high in crews unless they got surrounded and/or cut off. I don't know why crews did not suffer losses in correspondence to their vehicles. I have read numerous accounts of tank turrets being blown off the chassis and still most or all the crew managed to bail out. I mean, the energy to blow off a 10 to 22 ton turret will still not kill the entire crew?! Humans are kinda tough, i guess.

"Why was Rumjantsev (1st TA & 5th GTA) stopped dead in their tracks in August 1943 at Bogodukhov?" I'm not sure which action this was, but i believe they were stopped by 48 panzer corps, which was heavily mechanised and motorized. Anyway, after taking heavy losses, 5th Guards marched 200 miles north (i think it was north, could be wrong) and attacked where the German divisions weren't so tough (or mobile). I think 1943 was a very pivotal year for the East Front. That was when Lend-Lease really began to take effect via the famous Murmansk and not so famous Vladivostock route. Perhaps i would not be amiss in saying that before Kursk many German divisions had at least some mobility, but that after Kursk Russian production and lend-lease trucks and AFV allowed the Russians to be far more mobile than the Germans, especially after the Kursk losses. Right near the end of 1943 and certainly into 1944 the Germans began producing massive numbers of AFV, enough to almost catch up to the Russians. However, i'd like to point out that most of those AFVs went to the West Front, not the East.

The vast majority of tactical battles on the East Front was infantry only battles. Remember that Kursk, the biggest tank battle of the war, only had "around" 3000 tanks on the move at one time, and probably over a million men. That's a pretty large ratio of men compared to tanks. However, critical battles that make it into the books are the ones that usually had lots of AFVs. AFV divisions, though, were usually committed after infantry and arty (both German and Russian tactical doctrine, 1941 to 1945) had already breached a hole in enemy lines. The majority of battles portrayed in CB:BB with AFV on both sides are actually the counterattack and/or the counterrecon missions each side would take to defeat advancing armored columns. It's not very interesting to portray the actual assault in CB:BB because they were so one-sided. Heh, imagine a massive artillery barrage, followed by waves of infantry (with at least a 6 to 1 numerical superiority), followed by really large mechanized divisions.

Operational movement is not...and cannot...be modeled in BB. That said, Russian Infantry was far more mobile than the German Army on and after 1943. In 1944, especially, the German Army was so indifferentially equiped that I believe Hitler's "no retreat" orders really didn't make much of a difference in most of the battles...the German Divisions under attack were so immobile compared to their Russian counterparts that German Infantry couldn't escape anyway. The 6th Army's utter defeat in 1944 comes to mind. If you want to model the most important tactical battles with AFV (apologies to purists) on the East Front after 1942, just have Russians with all sorts of AFV attacking German infantry armed with mostly hollow charges and a handful of AT guns. Not really a "fair" battle but historically accurate.