Mad Russian

I'm getting to you. I have limited time to post here at the moment. So one answer at a time.

"the Soviet answer to German minefields before that time had been to drive through them." They didn't in the battle he was talking about, that he actual researched, right? He was presenting it as an advance, that they weren't naive anymore. The reality is, they never really were. Then he said, drive through. He is therefore talking about their tanks, not mine detecting with infantry. The Russians in fact provided pioneers to all their mech formations from the time of the tank and mech corps structures. He talks about the Soviets using specialized T-34's with minerollers for the first time in the war. That they had finally gotten to a position of aggressive engineering answers to the mine problem. The Red Army took tremendous casualties in the first half the war. We all know that. Engineers are a high priced commodity in an army. Expensive to train, regarding time and resources, and easy to lose. When the Red Army is operating at 1/2 to 1/4 TO&E strenghts for the Tank Brigades and Rifle units do you suppose that their engineer assets went unaffected? Reading the engineer manuals on what was supposed to be done won't usually get you the answer on what was done. If you are normally to have a company to support the attack and now you are down to a platoon or squad what is the answer? As Zhukov said, you attack. There is no reason to believe that the Red Army engineers were any better trained than Red Army infantry or tankers were when they were trying to stem the German tide in the mid-war years 42-43. By 44 they were better and beginning to be able to practice their art more skillfully on the battlefield. Much realistic high level stuff was conveyed, along with two great myths. It's all Hitlers fault was one, the officers excusing all army-source failings in Russia. And we did everything right, but just got overwhelmed by hordes of mindless zombies who didn't mind dying. You and I are in total agreement here. The Americans especially were traumatized by the Red Horde that we may soon have to fight. They did one study after another on the Red Army from the 50's - 70's. I saw several of them. If you look at the US military equipment that was developed after the war you see it there too. All weapons designed to produce high casualties. The reasoning was the mindless Red Army horde was coming. To be fair, in the best of the German memoires, it was at least apparent the Russians were making very good operational moves from late 1942 on. This typically sequed into "Hitler's fault" as the officer related all his "I told 'em so"'s, and frequently the story of his dismissal. The best German sources, IMMHO, are those written during the war. The combat action reports. They were just recording the fighting and not making any conclusions to why anything happened. There was a perfectly detectable fundamental problem with this entire line, even when unchallenged by other sources. The Germans were only outnumbered about 2 to 1 in Russia, in either manpower base or tanks produced over the war as a whole (a figure that might rise to 3 to 1 at worst with western commitments included, and that only late), yet they claimed inflicted losses of 5 to 10 to 1, and their only explanation for their eventual defeat was supposedly overwhelming Russian numbers, reaching they said 10 to 1 by the end. These figures simply make no mathematical sense. Tank produced is a very poor judge of the actual battlefield numbers. I know you don't like to add in the Lend Lease and I'll not rehash that here. Just know that those "other" Allied tanks allowed the Soviets to send their tanks where they wanted them and send the "other" tanks to sectors that might not have otherwise had armor support. The whole idea of the number of tanks killed compared to the number of tanks produced is wrong. A tank is only killed IF it was set on fire and burned OR was killed in enemy territory where you couldn't recover it. Both the Germans and Soviets were good at recycling armored vehicles. They had to be. For the entire middle part of the war AFV's were at a premium. They were NEEDED! In 41 the Germans didn't worry so much about recovery because they were the ones taking ground. From mid 43 on the Soviets were in that position. If you can recover the vehicle it isn't lost and doesn't need to be replaced by production figure vehicles. This was all detectable from the first principles of attrition reasoning regardless of sources, and was enough to show the German "line" on the war could not possibly be accurate. We now know from much more detailed returns that the Russians weathered the period when the loss ratio was highest - which was 1941 - by matching their losses with new forces fielded. Yes, the Red Army in December 1941 was larger in manpower than the Red Army of June 1941. The Germans failed to (in 1941), not because of anything forced by attrition logic on the battlefield, but by having a very low replacement rate, because they thought they were winning without it. Again I agree. The impact of the 10 to 1 inflicted losses in 1941 was therefore thrown away. (Note that that ratio *did* suffice to give the Germans numerical superiority in the main areas in front of Moscow in late 1941 - the Germans were *not* outnumbered in the AG center sector as the start of Typhoon - but they failed to cash that in, largely because their own replacement rate was effectively zero). Mud had nothing to do it? I doubt professional military officers ever bought half the German line. Nobody paid any attention to the Russian line, since it was all transparent lying. This situation lasted not for a few years but for several decades, through most of the cold war. Access to better German sources started to clear up the worst exaggerations of the German side accounts - nobody can still read Mellenthin or Raus and think they are getting the real story. The better sources were official documents in much greater detail - strength returns, battle narratives of individual divisions. None of those I served with did. The problem was you had to get information "somewhere" and the German side of the story was the only game in town at the time. So you had to try to see what "made sense". I am still to a large degree in that mode and you will see me make constant reference to "that doesn't make sense". I try to judge what I have actually seen done and experienced with what I have read. Rarely do the two match. But the real revolution in our understanding of the war came in the 1980s and after, as serious Russian sources were translated and their contents became widely known in the west. Glantz led in that. Zaloga was part of it. The official general staff studies showed the Russians were not mindless incompetents unaware of the system they were manipulating. Zaloga has been writing about the Red Army for a lot longer than Gantz. Gantz may now have more accurate sources but NOBODY tells the tactical level Russian story. Zaloga touches on it every so often but that is all you have today. That is as good as it gets. That and websites like Russian Battlefield. We learned the Russians had a fully developed mobile warfare doctrine not inferior to that of the early British theorist and in most respects level with the more advanced Germans. That they were operationally sophisticated, with their moves throughout the war clearly superior on that level. That in 1941, their force failed due to poor readiness and doctrinal weaknesses, the latter of the sort shared by early western powers (combined arms etc). That strategic surprise and Russian weaknesses were critical to the 1941 results, not simply German know-how. That the Russians learned and corrected their remaining doctrinal weaknesses by midwar. I agree but we are for the most part talking tactics here and I think that is where the Red Army was at a disadvantage. Strategically and operationally the Soviets did a good to stellar job. Tactically is where you get orders to take the hill at exactly 4 pm, from the same assembly area, nine days in a row. Or some other such less sophisticated answer. Don't get me wrong. I see the same thing from the Germans at times. It just seems to be more prevalent in the Soviet tactics. Not all German commanders were a tactical genius. Far from it. If they were how did they lose the war? The Germans continued to inflict high loss ratios, and tactically were very strong for similar equipment provided. But all the German officer explanations evaporated. They had not outplayed the Russians with operational mastery, not after 1941. I agree. The extension of that early result into a whole war explanation, that supposedly the German generals were geniuses and the Russians were dolts, fails completely in front of an actual map of the campaign. The high level moves the Russians make are clearly superior. The Germans lose the war because they fail at the strategic level, and they have no operational skill differential to make up for it. Which, IMO, only emphasizes the German tactical skill. The German Army in the East should have collasped a number of times. But then so should the Red Army. They both showed an amazing resilience to disaster. A large tactical skill differential is however clearly in evidence throughout the war. Not, however, of the scale of German loss claims (every Tiger didn't kill 14 tanks per afternoon without loss, etc). I agree. Actual Russian permanent military losses are variously estimated at 7 million to 10 million, and wounded might multiply that by a factor of 2-3. Taking the highest figure of 30 million and doing the math, one gets 70 men lost per division per day. On the lower figure, 35. In the west, the US averaged 25 men per division per day in battle losses. The range is 1.5 to 3 times and the expectation is no higher than twice. This too is reasonable. Moreover, a large portion of those Russian losses occurred in the early part of the war, when the Germans were the ones attacking. The loss ratio was highest at that time, running 10 to 1 in 1941 and over 5 to 1 in 1942. German losses show no marked acceleration - they look like a line with only minor kinks at the time of particular battles. Russian losses fell in absolute terms when they went over to the offensive instead of defending. This is hardly consistent with the "link arms and charge" picture. This is where things start to get weak. Numbers don't tell the story of how a battle was won. Only that it was. The evolution of battlefield casualties will explain more of what I am talking about. The great amount of attacker killed in a battle is during the assault phase. The great amount of defenders killed in the battle is during the exploitation phase. It doesn't explain that the Soviet infantry didn't attack across a minefield and lose 10 or even 20 to 1 to the defenders in the assault phase. Because in the review of the battle it says that the Soviets lost 1,000 men and the Germans lost 500. That is only a 2-1 loss ratio. Overall yes. But at at the sharp end. It doesn't tell you that the Soviets lost 600 of those men taking the village that allowed them to break through while the German defenders lost only 75 men there. It doesn't tell you that there were 400 German POW's taken as the Soviets encircled a German Regiment BEFORE the German reserves showed up to plug the line. As you pointed out to me, with guns in an Army, counting the number and dividing by km of front doesn't tell the story. Neither does comparing entire battle losses tell the story of when those men were killed and how. Did Russians every just drive through or walk through German minefields? Certainly. Why, because they were indifferent to losses and did not care, or did not know enough to provide pioneer detachments to every tank corps? No. Ask the relevant question and the answer is obvious -how exactly did the Germans use their mines? What range of minefield densities did they employ? Was "a minefield" a uniform object of impenetrable density? The relavent question is our problem. My relavent question is this: did the Soviets have enough engineers to support their main efforts even most of the time? With the losses they took, with the way the other arms performed, I think you can answer that yourself. Notice that Zaloga gives the Red Army credit for the Red Army engineers doing what engineers do. In this case, coming up with the same answer to minefields that other armies came up, with attaching mine rollers to their tanks. The Germans used mines to inflict losses and to deny areas, distinct ends. Is there another use for them I'm not aware of? To inflict losses, the best minefield is very large and quite thin. It denies a large area if avoided, and avoiding it is as hard as possible. Movement through it is positively invited. To deny area, a thick front field is often used, as a form of bluff, with everything beyond the crust thin. Sometimes entirely dummy fields are used, wired and marked, with a few mines along the forward edge and nothing else in them. Being a former combat engineer in the US Army I can tell that what you describe here isn't how we used mines. The one thing most gamers get wrong is that ALL engineering obstacles are to be covered by "observation and fire". In other words a minefield is not situated where you can't see it and defend it if need be. I'm sure the minefield tactics that I was taught have evolved since WWII. So, all I'll say is a "good" minefield would be deep not wide to inflict casualties. You want them in it and where they have to keep on taking casualties to get out of it. The whole time you are hitting them with every weapons system you have. A denial field would be as deep as you could make it. And everyday the enemy gives you, you make it deeper still. The idea of a minefield conjures up a belt that runs for miles and in most cases that just isn't possible. Who has that number of mines to deploy and how do you get them to the point of distribution? ...you don't always use the same density, or choose that density so high movement is impactical without deadly risk. Sometimes, when absolute denial of a small critical area is the purpose, you use a deep and dense field. But this is no more the existential essence of minefieldness than every German tank was a King Tiger. Yes you do. YOu make it as dense as you have the mines for. There is no difference in any minefield in the world. They all have the available number of mines on site, that time allows you to deploy, in them. If the field is also covered by fire, you can get shot to pieces if you are wrong. Today's doctrine is to cover them with fire not sure what WWII doctrine was. But none of this has anything to do with the mythical billion Russians of the all Asia mongol horde, not caring whether they live or die. This has nothing to do with the soldier caring about anything. It is the officer who has to execute his orders. How much does he care for the men's lives under him? AND if we link arms and charge do we get through with less casualties than if we trickle across that field in single file? That is what we are discussing here. Take the massive human waves into machineguns myth. It is a myth as a basic means whereby the Russians attacked. The losses per division day figures and the falling losses as they took the offensive give that the lie. But there are circumstances in which it undoubtedly happened. The most obvious of them is in the pocket fighting in 1941. I already addressed the problem of dividing losses in a battle with the tactics used to initiate the combat. So, how did they have to fight, when trying to escape encirclement, after the artillery ammo was gone? They had nothing left but small arms and precious little ammo for those. The Germans were on tactical defense, with holes dug, MGs, and on call artillery. That is where the 10 to 1 loss ratios of 1941 came from - half the Russian losses were incurred in just such appalling conditions. They were nothing like chosen conditions, and not the standard means of attacking. Great example of German unit histories sighting Russian wave attacks. But I wasn't sighting 1941 examples. I don't consider 1941 typical Eastern Front fighting so unless I am specifically talking about 1941 rarely use examples from that time period. If you read the Russian tactical reports on attack how-tos, drawn from actual fights, as early as the winter of 1941-2, one gets an entirely different picture of typical Russian infantry force tactics. They have a full TOE of supporting weapons and a variety of infantry types. These all have definite roles. They form storming parties, with pioneers, tommy gunners, and regular infantry. They fire at embrasures of pillboxes and MG nests with 45mm ATGs and 76mm infantry guns. They overwatch with their own MGs and mortars. The leading infantry detachments are quite small and composed of specialists, experts in close combat. They use SMGs and demolition charges, after approaching to close range while heavy weapons suppress individual firing points. None of which is any surprise to anyone who knows WW I tactics. Stalingrad has been the area that has recieved credit for coming up with most of what you talk about here. That is way late in 1942 and not the "entire Red Army". That was in fact "The Drill" for the Red Army in built up area fighting. Not in open ground. The Russians didn't have the command and control to use smaller units in the field. Count the number of radios in a Soviet RD and you will begin to get a sense of why mass was used. It could be more easily controled in mass. In more open fighting set pieces later in the war, there is also a definite procedure. There is an elaborate artillery fire plan. Prep bombardments by heavy guns and mortars. Rolling barrages by lighter field guns. Some field guns or SUs supporting with direct fire. The infantry advances certainly, but goes to ground when fired on, and the bombardment is renewed. German defenders describe a fire discipline dilemma - hold fire until they are close and you risk infantry melee and them getting into your holes. Fire too soon, and they go to ground safely, and you get shelled again. Yes, and one thing the Soviets are never given enough credit for is their infantry recon forces which, IMHO, were some of the best during the entire war for any army. Those include recon for artillery targets. It helped that partisans were available for that work in Russia but the same results were obtained as the war moved west. The Russian infantry forces were not tactical geniuses, but they weren't morons. I have never said they were either. The Germans had to work hard to beat them. They used corps level artillery massing to break parts of an attack in turn. Reserves to counterattack the intrusions, led by modest amounts of armor whenever possible. The Russians sometimes took unnecessary casualties by trying to get infantry massing to break through. E.g. throw a regiment (with supporting fire, as above) at a company on a narrow front. That usually works but gets more people killed, as each defending MG has denser targets. These are the mass attacks that I am refering to. Of course, not all attacks were link arms and charge. You take every comment as a literal truth even when you get upset if others take your comments that same way. German officers noticed these things as mistakes, and mistakes they were. But the sort of tactic that sometimes works by straightforward odds, and has a definite counter (defender counter-massing by reactive arty). It looked to them like indifference to losses. It was just a move and counter escalation chain that the Germans often (but not remotely always) managed to win. We are back to the Russian saying, "quantity has it's own quality." "Typical IDs at the time of Kursk had 40-60 PAK... Yes, I agree and the plan had been for them to have 200." Who cares about the plan? They had 40-60 PAK, which is plenty to stop one tank brigade. But not a corps. What you are saying as I understand it is that only the Germans deployed AT guns in an effective way. That the Soviets didn't deploy in Pak Fronts as I have seen Zaloga, Erickson and Glantz all comment on, but in penny packets. I for one would love to see the tactical deployment maps you are looking at. "this number is less than what you would find with a Soviet RD" Um, TOE for a Russian RD is 36 45mm ATGs in this arm. They also have 76mm in their divisional artillery. But then, the Germans also have 105mm in their divisional artillery, in addition to their force of PAK. Not so. Every gun in a Soviet RD is issued with AT rounds making them ALL AT guns. Count them again. If you break through a RD position every single is capable of engaging German tanks with AT rounds. At Kursk, some Russian RDs had as many as 60-70 ATGs, but no they did not have 200. The whole front echelon of 13th army had 204 guns in 44 AT strongpoints, for 32 km of front. With 4 RDs in that forward echelon. That is it, for 5 km of depth, in front of the whole German northern attack. Which had 600 AFVs in its front line forces. How far back was the second echelon? Were they not in supporting positions to the front echelon? "you don't want to acknowledge that they could have any concentration of firepower on the battlefield outside of penny packets." On the contrary, I am looking at their actual maps of AT defense schemes. They use a deep, continuous field of small AT cells. Each is indeed a penny packet - one battery, occasionally two facing two ways. The net attrition effect of needing to run over lots of them no doubt weakened the German armor. But that is not their main effect nor their intended effect. Their intended effect is to channel the German attack. The Germans have to pick places and send entire panzer regiments over them, to get through. Small tank forces will not. These are the maps I'd like to see. Is there any possibility of getting a copy? It just gets deeper into the ATG "sea", with only already cleared routes passable for anything but a full panzer regiment. And tanks then flock to those panzer regiment positions. The ATG scheme is deep self sealing to keep the wound from ripping wide. The antibodies are the armor - and massed artillery fire, as well. Was this not what I said? That the ATG's were at every part of the Kursk battlefield? Sometimes I think we lose sight of what has been gone over. "yes I do believe there was a shortage of German AT guns. Or maybe I missed something...the Germans did lose the war because the Soviets outproduced them right? That means then that the Germans were short of equipment in the later stages of the war right?" German output was highest at the later stages of the war, because they were slow to mobilize. They had lots of excellent weapons, an improving mix of them in fact, through mid 1944. Russian field strength increased, though not continually. In general they moderated the pace of their offensives to what their replacement stream could make good. Sometimes they exceeded it, e.g. in the winter of 1942, and again in the fall of 1943. They made ground at those times but with strength in the field falling, because they were pressing as hard as they could. German ATGs were as numerous as AFVs throughout the war, and much more evenly distributed. They killed tons of Russian armor. The Germans ran low but not out, of operational tanks, then out of both ground and infantry divisions. Before 1944 most of their losses were exchange off affairs, generally at favorable ratios. After 1944 the Russians were sometimes able to inflict more than they lost. You want me to believe that the Germans didn't have enough tanks to bring all the Panzer Divisions up to strength but they had enough AT guns to bring every German Division up to TO&E? That doesn't pass the "make sense" test. The main reason the Germans were outnumbered is they were so late to mobilize. Their peak tank output was as high as the Russians'. It just didn't get there until 1944, while the Russians were near their full output as early as 1942. The Russians got a higher integral with the same peak by switching production "on" two years sooner. As the war only lasted 4 years from the time of the invasion, that almost doubled their effective production time (at peak rates). As a result, they made as many tanks as the Germans made tanks and PAK combined. Okay? We agree that the Germans were outnumbered and outproduced. With significant help in the last year in the west, to be sure - but they could have finished it themselves at that point. I absolutely agree with you here. The Soviets would have ended the war by themselves if they had needed to. "Soviet tactics in WWII were all about not worrying about the casualties they took? Everything I read and their own manuals say so." Deep battle. Parallel pursuit. Assault detachment. Shock troops. Tank corps. Maskirovka. Nobody can even read a glossary of WW II Soviet military terms and think their tactics were "link arms and charge". You have grabbed "link arms and charge" by the collar and held on. Okay, let's relegate link arms and charge back to what it was originally, an example of Soviet use of mass infantry assault. Not the preferred tactic of choice, but still used. No mass infantry attacks were the rule not the exception. Link arms and charge was the exception not the rule. "The term "Human Wave" was coined to explain Russian infantry tactics." Yes they used human waves. It is what echelon deployments, columnar depth, look like on the receiving end. No, a human wave is not "link arms and charge". I never said they did. You did. It simple means a battalion attacks with leading companies, then a second wave of its reserve at any point that is holding out. Then the regiment does the same thing. And the division. And the corps. And the army. Which means a single strongpoint might be hit 5, 10, 15 times in a row if he defeats the first attack. 2-3 of them in the same tactical fight, spaced by minutes rather than hours. Each a "human wave". My point exactly. What appalled the German officers about this is it violated their own hit-em-where-they-ain't, flanking-is-always-preferably, tactical doctrines. Repeated frontal assaults on positions that had already withstood similar attacks struck them as wasteful and mad. They'd go around, or try elsewhere, or use a different weapon as the primary arm. Those dang Russians kept coming again and again, frontally - bombard, assault detachment leading, line companies, go to ground if shot up, call down more arty, melee infantry to infantry in bloody exchanges if they get close. It appalled US Intelligence officers as well. One thing that has not been mentioned in the evolution of the history of WWII and the "truthfulness" of the claims of both sides is the Arab-Israeli wars. These were fought just like the Germans described the Soviet tactics were. They leant great credence at the time to the German histories.

What is inappropriate about Jason making money with the knowledge that he has about WWII? I don't care if you have sustained unprovoked 'abuse' or not. Jason is a very intelligent man and I think has the qualifications of writing a good series of books. He seems to have the resource base for doing it as well. While his debating skills, IMHO, are suspect I don't doubt his intense interest in the subject matter and his obvious devotion to studying the war. I think all that knowledge needs to be shared in a more formal setting than here on the forums, where you have to go hunting for bits and pieces of it through the threads. That's all I'm saying.

In another thread I wrote that Jason should write a book on the Eastern Front. What I have pondered over the past few days since then is that he should really write several. It should be with the wargamer in mind. There should be a book on each year and the forces, tactics and raw data that he seems to have at his fingetips. Maps would be great too. I have seen him quote Glantz as a source and German combat reports. Even the Soviet doctrinal manuals, but an entire listing of his sources would be worth the price of the books. This is not a joke. I think Jason is wasting his talents here on these pages when he could be making money. I will buy the first copy.

But the exaggeration and excuses are there, and I don't think very hard to spot. Certainly nationalism and racism pops up in those places frequently -- quite expectedly from the Nazi's. If you read Soviet accounts of the war they are there too. If they were written during the 50's -90's. Any book that you read is going to have a bias. I agree that Bigduke6 has a right to view the German story of "it was Soviet mass and Hitler alone that beat us." as a line of bull. BUT the Soviet side of, "we never attacked in mass and we won the war by being better tactically", isn't all the truth and nothing but the truth either. While the bais of certain or all of the histories that were written is a facinating subject this thread was orginally about tactics and a bit after that the drill used for managing tactical situations in the Ukriane. The subjects being discussed lately need to be in a thread all their own. They will support one. This is a subject where people close to the history get very emotional. My recommendation Bigduke6 is that you start a thread on accurate historical recording or some such. You will get plenty of takers. Few will support your view that all things German are corrupted and all things Soviet are pure though so get ready. I'll post some replies on the tactical and drill issues that started this thread later. I still have to give an answer to Jason's post as well. [ May 27, 2005, 07:35 PM: Message edited by: Panther Commander ]

Yes, I saw that they didn't take the files the first time. That should be fixed. I reloaded them this evening and they worked for me. His third scenario is posted now as well. Enjoy.

Bigduke6 since you posted first I'll try to answer your comments first. I think at least part of what Jason is getting is that the Soviets were not morons. They had their own military doctrine which placed success above all, and loss of life simply was not the worry that it was in Western armies. Not anybody I know thinks the Soviets were morons. I think their command system was much more regimented than most armies in WWII and that caused the lower level tactics to be much more rigid. The thing is, that's far, far away from "lock arms and charge". I talk to Red Army veterans regularly and not one of them has told me something along the lines of "You know, the Western histories are all wrong, in fact the Red Army did a pretty good job of protecting the lives of its soldiers." Every single one of them tells me something roughly along the lines of "Our soldiers died like flies at times, if high command had a goal our lives weren't worth a kopeck." I believe you just proved my point about the value the Soviets placed on human life and the willingness to sacrifice bodies for terrain. No matter how small the gain. they lost Ukraine pretty much in its entirity during Kutuzov. This was mobile warfare, before Bagratian, and at the height of German Panzer superiority. So how do those supposedly stupid Soviets manage that success? I'm not following you here. The Germans were not at the height of Panzer superiority in 1943. That was the summer of 1941. After that things fell apart rapidly. They tried to get the superiority back by introducing the Tiger and Panthers but that didn't work because of the shear numbers of T-34's involved. During the 1944 summer offensives the Red Army with roughly a 2-1 numerical superiority and 1.5 to 1 armor superiority broke the back of the Wehrmacht. It wasn't human wave charges, and it wasn't overwhelming numerical superiority. The forces deployed during Operation Bagration are: 52 German Infantry Division equivalents. 553 tanks and assault guns of which 480 were StuG III's. The Soviets attacked with 118 Rifle Divisions, 8 Tank and Mechanized Corps, 6 Cavalry Divisions and 13 Artillery Divisions. During the initial phases of Bagration that allowed the Soviets an advantage of about 2 1/2 to 1 in men and about 6 to 1 in armor. Operation Bagration is a shining example of the ability of Soviet higher staff officers being able to fight the Germans on better than even footing. They used deception to set the German defense up then they used massed firepower to destroy it. This was a brilliantly conceived and executed operation. As has been pointed out, the Soviets had learned their lessons. One of the things they learned was that they didn't control the German Army and what worked for the Germans wouldn't necessarily work for the Soviets. They developed their own tactics both from their theories before the war and the experiences gained during the war. It helped them tremendously to have a spy ring that fed them deployment information but they still had to fight the battles on the ground. Don't read the memoirs of German Generals looking for an objective view of the war. Read the Divisional histories, especially the combat reports. Those were written at the time and not for American Army Intelligence officers. The only way to reduce the Red Army to a bunch of goons sending 17-year-olds to mass slaughter in human wave charges is to be willfully ignorant of the Russo-Soviet side of the historical literature. Don't misunderstand my human wave comment. I made that in rebuttal to Jason saying the Soviets cared about the casualties that they took when trying to gain ground. I'm not saying that the Soviets resorted to human wave attacks in every attack. That of course is insane. But it is hard to draw many other conclusions from this statement by Steven Zaloga in "Bagration 1944: The Destruction of Army Group Centre"..."as the Russians were fond of saying,'quantity has a quality all it's own'." What is that saying? It tells me that the Soviets used what they had. They had lots of men and they used them. To get good odds in an infantry attack they attacked in mass. Or waves if you will. Why wouldn't you want to overwhelm the enemy infantry if you outnumbered them 2-3-4 to 1? It's what I would do. As you say, the Soviets weren't morons. They had the manpower and they used it. So much so that by the end of the war they were having a hard time replacing their infanty losses. Like the Germans, Americans and British. The Red Army was the largest army in the world. Why would the term Russian Steamroller be applied if it wasn't used in mass? Zhukov's response was right out of central planning: we attack right over them, of course. Zhukov wasn't lying. If there was a minefield in the way that hadn't been cleared they would attack right over it. So would any other army. If you get out there and then try to stop and turn around you are going to get shot in the back. Might as well give yourself a fighting chance and try to go over it and into the enemy positions. Then at least you have a chance to live. Getting shot in the back isn't my idea of a good afternoon. You tie the truck to the busted vehicle, then drive to the other side of the field, and then pull the busted vehicle across the field. Repeat in the other direction as necessay. For minefields in rear areas okay. Not one covered by fire. How do you get to both sides the minefield and why do the Germans just sit back and watch you clear it? I was a combat engineer during my own tour of duty. So I know a bit about "actually" placing and taking up mines. The Red Army looked at human life as a valuable but expendable resource for achieving military goals. I don't know that I agree that they thought it was valuable but I do think they looked at their troops as an expendable resource. To an extent I think all higher level commanders of all armies do. I think in WWII the Soviets just looked at their men as a little more expendable than other armies. The Red Army by late 1943 knew they could beat the Germans, and by mid 1944 they knew they would beat the Germans. Yes, they learned. One of the things they learned was to apply overwhelming concentration of force. I also agree, by 1944 the Soviets were going to win the war whether anybody else joined in or not. But fight the Germans the Red Army did. The veterans I talk to are pretty much unanimous: it was us, and no one else, that defeated the Germans. And not one of them has told me: And the way we did it, we simply had more bodies than the Germans had bullets. I agree with this too. The way the Germans were beaten on the Eastern Front was with more bodies and more bullets (tanks). End of story. Good Post. I'm glad you joined the discussion.

They shouldn't change at all. But I'm not 100% certain that they wouldn't lose some of their ammo load outs.

Put the date back correctly. The units you bought will stay in the scenario when you change it back.

You can't protect them if you get the Nashorns killed. I've killed the T-34's and then gone into the village to capture flags with them in support of the infantry. The trick is to let the infantry move into a position to be seen and then go into hiding. While the T-34's turn to face the infantry that they could see a bit ago the Nashorns move. Timing can be a problem and I have lost squads pulling this little maneuver off. Break your infantry into half squads for the demonstration that way if you get one hit hard you only lose half the squad.

Bigduke6 and Jason. Two very good posts. At this moment I don't have time to answer them. But I will before this weekend. I would like to say just a couple of things in passing. While I agree that the interviews after the war were mainly from a German viewpoint and that those interviews are given with a bias as to "why we lost the war" not all Eastern Front source information that has a German origin is that way. One of the reasons that the German interviews were with a "why we lost the war" bias is that is what the Western interviewers were looking for. What is the reason that the Soviets won? Simple we were outnumbered and Hitler was a fool that wouldn't listen. Both good answers but way too oversimplified. What you give no credit to are the other sources. Combat reports from during the war. Reports that had no ax to grind and that had to give no excuses to Western listeners. Also, there are the books written by combat veterans that were not General Officers. What reason could these men have for making up Soviet attacks that were almost overwhelming in number, that came at the same time, day after day with no change in time, tactics or results? These sources I believe are credible. Jason you also quote that you have read German divisional combat reports. Since you quoted them apparently you think they are credible too. If you have read many of them you will see the pattern of Soviet disregard for human life in them. The historians that tried to cover the Eastern Front from the Soviet side once again I think have done a credible job. But let's look at what we have from that group. Erickson, Glantz and Zaloga are the main ones. Erickson's works are the older by far, but I read somewhere that he stands by his older facts. That could be author pride or the fact that he was fairly accurate. For purposes of most of our discussions it doesn't matter. His history is of a strategic and operational level. Glantz writes his histories at the same level. Zaloga writes his history at the next lower level. I also have books that were written by the Soviets themselves. My personal favorite is written by Chuikov. I stayed away from them for the most part because if you want to read biased accounts read the ones written by the Soviets. The one written by Chuikov isn't bad. But once again at a higher level than tactical. So where is a non-Soviet to get information on the tactical engagements if not from German based sources? Both of you take a shot at me for having gotten my opinions on tactical level combat in the east from German sources. I don't read or speak Russian. So what does that leave me? The US reports on the Soviets? Those really are biased. I don't have Soviet combat veterans to talk with either. Though please do us all a favor and record what they are telling you. Not necessarily for the forums but they are getting old and once they die their story goes with them. I would also like to thank you Jason. This is the kind of post that I was hoping to get from you. Facts and your opinion. Not telling me how stupid I am or that I got all my information from Signal magazine. I have done a lot of research on WWII as have many who post on this website. To dismiss them with cavalier comments like "horsefeathers" and "that is simply wrong" WITHOUT explaining why you think they are wrong does a huge disservice to the person you are discussing the subject matter with and also to yourself. You are possibly so intelligent that you don't see why the rest of us "don't get it". I have in fact seen you post that sentiment before. A little history about me and us. I started making scenarios with CSDT. I wanted my scenarios to be only historically based and as accurate as I could get them so I started HSG(Historical Scenario Design Group) Some of the best reviews I've gotten on my work have come from you Jason. Until we started disagreeing here on this site. So, you either changed your mind on how I interpret tactical level WWII situations in CM, since then, or something else happened. HSG started what we refer to as the "Hero" series. The Heroes of the Soviet Union (HOSU), Knights Cross (KC), Congressional Medal of Honor (MOH) and Victoria Cross (VC) series were all started from that. In these scenarios we depict the actions that resulted in the issuing of the commendations. I am well aware of how a force of inferior size attacks and defeats a force of equal or greater size in CM. I've engineered the scenarios that do it. Judging from the reviews they are well liked. They are also very tough and there is ALWAYS a force multiplier involved. As I told you before. A company of infantry can move across open ground and attack another company and WIN! BUT it won't be easy and you should expect to take casualties. I always hope for the best and plan for the worst. If I get the position relatively casualty free, great! If it costs me we move on from there. The reason I don't like your idea of "The Drill" as the answer is not that I don't know the drill, but that it has a set of parameters to activate it as intended. In your case, you say that a FO is the answer. How often in CM do you come on a situation where you don't have the FO in your force mix? Then, out goes the drill and in comes leadership. You quoted the answer to be the combined arms drill to attack Soviet infantry positions in the open. What if you have no armor? How are you going to take those positions with virtually no losses with it? How will learning the combined arms attack drill help you if you have no armor to attack it with? Lastly, I am not saying that Soviet leadership at SOME levels wasn't as good as the Germans. I don't think it was at the Junior Officer level which is where CM takes place. I don't think it was because I don't think it was allowed to be. Now I have to go. But don't worry I'll be back. This is finally getting informative. Someplace I thought we were going in the beginning.

Sorry we were posting so fast that I missed some of your posts. Some very important ones at that. Steven Zaloga in his book "Bagration 1944" states that the Soviet answer to German minefields before that time had been to drive through them. You don't seem to think much of the statements that Mr. Zaloga makes since you have responded to them unfavorably in the past. That isn't a novel concept though. In a tactical setting all armies have used that on the spot expedient. AND not everybody that disagrees with you gets their information from Signal magazine. Since I've never even seen one that would be a little hard. Give the world some credit Jason. Somebody else does serious study of WWII besides just YOU. Typical IDs at the time of Kursk had 40-60 PAK... Yes, I agree and the plan had been for them to have 200. But even then this number is less than what you would find with a Soviet RD and you don't want to acknowledge that they could have any concentration of firepower on the battlefield outside of penny packets. Who is playing with nationalistic overtones now? Not only that but the German Army loaded the attack formations at Kursk the rest of the German Army starved for replacements in both men and material so the attack at Kursk could go in with anything close to resembling full strength. So, yes I do believe there was a shortage of German AT guns. Or maybe I missed something...the Germans did lose the war because the Soviets outproduced them right? That means then that the Germans were short of equipment in the later stages of the war right? PC - you don't seem to have any idea how they were deployed. Yes, I have they were deployed in Pak Fronts in the main attack sectors where they knew the Germans were coming and had known for months. It's no great thing to win a battle when you know all the variables. The Russians did. It was HARD to stop the Germans but they held all the cards. They knew more about the German deployment than their army commanders did. Do I think that Soviet tactics in WWII were all about not worrying about the casualties they took? Everything I read and their own manuals say so. Or maybe again I am "simply wrong". Maybe the Russians didn't lose millions of men on the Eastern Front. Have you seen how the Soviets attacked in the same place at the same for days on end having thousands of men killed to take a hill? THOUSANDS!! Getting a company of men killed to get a field is not that big an effort against those numbers. The battlefield accounts are full of the Russian disregard for human life. The term "Human Wave" was coined to explain Russian infantry tactics. There is a real conservative tactic for you. Saves lots of lives that the Russians are concerned with saving. *** Line up! At my order advance on the German trenches. Now Lock arms and RUN!! *** Great regard for human losses shown there. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Why would the Russians not care about how many men they lost in taking that field? Because at the end of the day two things had happened. They now owned the field and they could replace their losses in men and machines. The Germans couldn't and that is why the Russians won and the Germans lost. I am thinking that maybe you should write a book. You have so much knowledge that you should share it in a more formal setting. I am NOT being funny here. Being able to sit down and read about WWII from your viewpoint, whether or not I agree with it, and some of it I do agree with, would be interesting. You make some good points and I would like to see how you formulated your opinions. I would also like to see the resources that you have used to get to that opinion. So if you decide to write your book I'll buy the first copy. Your comment about me being contrarian to your positions is funny. You rarely agree with anything anybody says. So for that to be true all I have to do is say pretty much anything and I have disagreed with you. It was interesting before I became another walkaway and leave this thread to the obtuse guy. [ May 24, 2005, 05:22 AM: Message edited by: Panther Commander ]

I have played this scenario and not lost a Nashorn with a CEB of +2. The way I accomplish that is to demonstrate with my infantry and get the Russian tanks attention then take them out with the Nashorns. Timing is everything.

But it could be from as late as Israel's war for independence or the later wars too.

Not if I disagree with you, or question you on any point, you won't discuss it with me. You left your own 1941 thread after insulting about half the people on it for daring to question the Great Profassor Jason on his all emcompassing knowledge of WWII. You won't hold a civil discussion with anyone that is questioning your sources or knowledge. You just insult them until they leave the threads. Trolls we are. Just plain trolls. We eat and disperse red meat. Don't bring facts to the conversation that just muddles it up. Everyone but Profassor Jason and his chosen few... Interesting that you think I object to your teaching people about CM. That was why I came into this thread in the first place, because I thought I was going to learn something about fighting in the steppes. I had seen and been a part of your ire before in strategic settings but was hoping for something different in a tactical one. I hope that Adam and Anteportas get some helpful tips from this thread. That is what they seem to have come here for as well, and so far they aren't questioning anything you say, so they should be safe from getting insulted. I was wrong, so I'll leave you to bask in your own glow.

So I thought I'd start a thread on tactics in this terrain type. These are all well understood tactical issues in general terms. Not to get into a debate with anybody... What exactly does "grok" mean anyway? I am learning the hard way that you only lecture and that the rest of the world should listen and not interrupt. I think the most positive thing you managed to say was that the thread was interesting. In charity, no doubt not on purpose, but in exuberance about discussing such subjects and impenetrable self confidence that you had nothing to learn about them. You clearly thought you had tons to teach everyone about how to fight in steppe, having done some of it in CM. You just weren't paying much attention to the stated problem. You were thinking of the typical ones that occur in steppe scenarios you've played, instead. I spent half my first post explaining that the more realistic situations I was talking about differ from typical CM QBs and scenarios in material ways (far more fortifications, lower loss tolerance, less symmetric forces, etc). But that did not seem to have any impact on your comments. It's a shame really that I didn't realise sooner that BFC gave you your own threads and that others are not supposed to post or ask questions in your threads. You didn't want to discuss tactics as you said. You wanted new gamers to be impressed with how much you know. I came to this thread because there is a great deal that I can learn about the fighting in the Ukraine and I thought you might have some useful tips on how to do so. Learning the book drill is not one of them. That is older than I am and from what I've seen of fighting in the Ukraine not of much value. You want to claim to have written the book on infantry tactics...now that was rich. Rommel wrote the one for the Germans. Is that the one you are referring to? When I finally got around to answering all of your posts in detail, I just went through them piece by piece and addressed every single point you raised that I did not agree with. Your comments seemed to me to be interfering with reception of my thesis - since you were stumping for no changes in tactical drill, later for no drill book at all, and in between for light armor scouting - and you threw in scads of controversial claims about the actual history and doctrine as well. Russians just ignore minefields, they find them by walking through them. They throw away scads of people to take each field. Germans don't have any PAK in 1943. Expecting those sorts of claims to meet with hearty hear-hears is a rather strange attitude. They are red meat, troll fare. I gave you substantive answers at great length anyway. Yes, I have seen your snubs of some of the worlds most respected Soviet force/Eastern Front historians before. I have seen you pass off historically researched and published authors information with terms like, " that is simply wrong" or one of your favorites "horsefeathers". You never offer alternative sources just derision. You got exactly the treatment your comments deserved. Thank you for that. I'm sure you feel better now. I did get my money's worth though. I got the lecture and the correct frame of mind that if I need to know anything about WWII, at any level, for any nation, I have but to ask you. You need to continue to teach the uninformed. Allow them to be sufficiently in awe of your great wisdom. They all need to be lectured and you are just the man for the job. You lecture very well. You don't discuss or debate well at all. But then, that is just my opinion and I already know what you think of that...it's simply wrong.

You changed the emphasis of this thread so many times a person would need a road map just to follow along. I'm sure that new gamers would have a wonderful time trying to determine what it is that you are trying to tell them. You are right that at the end our discussion had elevated to a level that was beyond the scope of the new gamer. What the main point of my "Drill" explanation is that each and every tactical situation requires different answers. That the "Drill" that they read about in Jason's thread just doesn't seem to work here for me now. What am I doing wrong?! Nothing. "The Drill" doesn't fit this situation. What then? The guy runs back here for more of your advice. This thread started as a discussion of tactics in the Ukraine. At least that was what you said it was going to be about. It ended up being about drills that new guys need to learn for the world over and has really nothing to do with tactics in the Ukraine. To me the discussion of drills is worthless. Because the very act of learning them means that you have to unlearn them later. If you want to teach the new guys something worthwhile IMO, try to use your vast knowledge to teach them tactics. You know them and from what I have seen are a good teacher. You paint a visual picture that others often can relate to. Myself included. This was a very good post. Direct and to the point. You seem to be a very well educated man. Discussions are just that, discussions. I know that we have crossed swords before and maybe that frustrated you when I joined your thread. That was not the intent. I like to see what your views on things are because we have such different ideas of how WWII was fought. I know how much research I have done and it appears to me that you have done a fair amount yourself. I personally think it is far beneath you to get personal with people that try to have discussions with you. Being insulting and condescending doesn't bring anything to the discussion. One thing that really bothers me personally about all of your arguements is that you are right but NEVER quote sources. While those having a different opinion than yours freely quote theirs. That doesn't help you convince other more knowledgeable gamers that you are correct in your views. Maybe someday we can have our discussion on Battlefield recon in Russia. I would like that... Have a good day Jason.

The map is taken from an actual battle map. So I can't take any of the credit for it. It does make for a good fight though.

Let me ask you a simple question... Do you only use the drills that you have read about while playing CM? Do you know them by heart and can resite them verbatum? I don't think you do. Any of the above. I have all the German and Soviet tactical doctrine. Use it as it's set down and you will more often than not lose. That is because each and every tactical situation is different. The book answer only gives you a starting place not a definative absolute. Tactics are different than the drill. They are more often followed. For instance, the German tactic, of counterattacking immediately any Soviet breakthrough. Sadly, we have come that point in most threads where someone dares to discuss a different position than you have, where you begin to get personal and derogatory. Why you see a need to go there is beyond me. What makes you so insecure in your life that you think you have to know everything there is to know about WWII and can never be wrong? That you make personal attacks against the person that is in a discussion with you. Or is it that you are so much smarter than all of the rest of us? Or maybe you are just so much smarter than I am...

As for the "large amounts of AT guns", yes the Russians had prepared defenses at Kursk. The Germans still broke through the front line defenses essentially everywhere, because those defenses were so deeply layered, the number of ATGs actually at the front line in any given area was quite modest. Jason, I don't know what histories of Kursk you've been reading but from "The Battle of Kursk" by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House on page 64 it states... "In the Central Front for example, the overall density of per kilometer of defensive front was 870 men, 4.7 tanks and 19.8 guns/mortars. However,in the sector of Central Front's 13th Army, this density increased to 4,500 men, 45 tanks and 104.3 gun tubes." The 13th Army was assigned the sector of the Kursk salient given to Model's 9th Army to attack on the northern shoulder. So, yes, I do think that there were Soviet guns there in anything but modest numbers. The reason that the Germans kept switching directions was to attack the Pak Fronts and defenses from different angles instead of frontally. Trying to catch the Soviet defenders off guard. One should never forget that the Soviets knew when, where, and in what numbers the Germans would attack at Kursk. They set and baited a trap and the Germans walked right into it. The Germans still broke through the front line defenses essentially everywhere... The Germans advanced for half the distance of their objectives. Only one German unit reached it's first day objectives. That was the 505th Heavy Tank Battalion (Tiger). The German offensive was so well run that half way through it the Soviets launched their own offensive. Yes, Kursk is a shining example of German operational genius. But we digress... If anybody has the impression there was one continous gun front at Kursk, of the tactical densities that term denotes (meaning, guns per unit space equal tanks attacking that space), over the whole frontage - no there wasn't, not remotely. At the front line a km of front might or might not have a single nest of 4 45mm ATGs. The main attack sectors were loaded with Soviet At guns. The other secondary sectors had more than your estimated 4 45mm guns. 19.8 is a far cry from 4. Even if 2/3 of those were mortars that still leaves 6 as AT guns as the average. You may have done the Soviet commanders in your campaign a disservice by not giving them plenty of AT firepower. It was there.

I agree. Neither sides recon forces were tailored to fight early on. Later they were but that isn't in the scope of this conversation. At least I got the German attack/Russian defense part of this thread right... German Recon Bn's had their own AT assets. There were far from helpless. So much so that they were often used as firebrigades. You are correct that in this tactical situation where the enemy defensive line is established in a non-fluid environment the AC's of the Panzer Division would not be used. The recon element of the PG regiment more than likely would be. That would be an infanty recon type unit. It would be more than the half squad you quoted earlier for the recon duties however. Our discussion of the AC's kind of took on a life of it's own away from the other. That happened when I obsessed on the Recon element that you keep going away from. The evolution of battlefield recon in WWII, especially on the Russian front, is a very interesting subject. One we try later, in another thread. I'm wondering why you aren't interested in finding where the enemy is in strength before you start your attack. The other military axiom I quoted you earlier was, "Find them, Fix Them, Destroy Them." You have been, for the most part, skipping the first one. Do that and you will pay a high price in casualties for your units. I still maintain, as you supported in your own comments, that the only hard and fast rules of the drill, is that, there are no hard and fast rules. The Drill is also known as going by the book. Good commanders normally throw the book out the window. They operate on a situation by situation basis, letting the circumstances dictate their response and not the set drill that somebody maybe thousands of miles away and decades ago dreamed up. Two examples of how armies viewed the book answer are, the Germans were noted for throwing out the book and making decisions on the spot while the British were noted for doing everything by the book and changing nothing from the drill.

I think you need to talk nations. While it is true what one man can do, another can do, we are talking machines here. What an Sdkfz 232 8 wheeled armored car can do a BA-64 more than likely cannot. I'm not going into the untermensch line of thought here. I believe that the Russian soldier showed that they can fight with anybody. What I am talking about is the difference between the doctrines of the two armies during the July 1943 time period. They are not the same and would not be applied the same. You can make generalities but you said earlier: We are discussing not principles but drills. Now you want to discuss drills. Okay with me. I don't buy any of your "established maxims of war" - which in fact apply to a far higher scale than CM tactical. It is simply the advice to use a large echelon unit to fight a smaller one. Firstly, they aren't my axioms of war. Secondly, they apply at all levels. You need firepower superiority and concentration of force at the point of attack to be able to win...in most cases. When these axioms are ignored or broken and the attackers are successful is when medals are issued because it is an unusual event. No, you do not need to get a company killed to kill a company, even attacking, even in open ground. Where did I say that you did? I said that you will more than likely take heavier losses than the defender. If the odds are as you just stated them...one company against another one attacking across open ground you are going to get most of them killed and not get the position 9 times out of 1o. As you stated, the difference is in the force multipliers. Either more than 1 to 1 or other multipliers like other infantry, tanks or artillery. Maybe it's something as insignificant as a smoke screen that allows your company to only have to engage a platoon of his defenders at a single time. BUT you are going to need some force multiplier to attack his force at greater than 1 to 1 odds. Attackers regular inflict losses up to 10 to 1 against the inferior forces they hit - defender eliminated, attacker intact. Once again, this is true to an extent. Most defenders are killed during the exploitation phase of a battle. Not during the assault phase. However, if you get 10 to 1 odds during the attack the defender will take grievous losses while not inflicting many casualties themselves. Quite an impressive description of a drill. All of which is accurate. You started this thread by asking this question... So I thought I'd start a thread on tactics in this terrain type. There was no mention of "The Drill" in that statement. The premise, I have carried on most of our conversations with, has been about tactics. Not "The Drill", which as we both agree changes by the moment. So if you want to discuss "The Drill" now that is fine too. But I think for "The Drill" we need a bit more information. Like who is the attacking force and who the defenders. What is the exact tactical situation, because as you just pointed out "The Drill" changes with each and every application and you need to know them all to choose which of them covers the situation at hand. Then, when I said you have to be able to do it ten times in a row without running out of anything, for some strange reason you think this must mean laterally along the front. Um, no. Sorry, I misunderstood you to mean that the attack was an ongoing chain of events that were closely related. Not in the context of your campaign. That is a valid point. You cannot burn your unit to death and use it up in a single attack because there is always tomorrow. UNLESS you are a Russian commander. The Soviets routinely used their units up in combat and had them rebuilt later. It was so ingrained in the Soviet military that it was a strategy they employed throughout the 70's-80's as well.

From some of your comments I am going to assume that the attacking formations are German. Although with Kursk they could be either but the doctrines of the two armies were far apart at this time. Weak AT, the right thing is to push with the armor. A gun front, the right thing (besides going elsewhere) is to use lots of arty and soft firepower heavy weapons. Armor, the right thing is to hang back with the tanks and to have heavy AT support weapons, your own supporting "gun front". While these comments are generalizations and it was my understanding that you wanted to stay away from them and focus more on the drill involved in the attack solution, I agree with you. This once again brings us back to the recon elements of a Panzer Division or SS Panzer Division. Sorry, I forgot which unit you based your campaign on. They were 20mm armed light skinned vehicles more than capable of reconning infantry strong points. IF these infantry strong points are Russian, and once again I am assuming that they are, then the defense becomes much more engineer oriented. There will be more mines, wires, trenches than in a German defensive position. At Kursk and for most of the war only at Kursk, the Russians will also have a good availability of TRP's. These will really hurt the attacker. The Russians had their defensive positions built up to historic proportions at Kursk as everyone knows about. That includes the ability of the artillery to respond much quicker than normal. The Russians had learned Pak Fronts from the Germans and used them extensively at Kursk. So you are right to assume a German attack will face a large amount of Russian AT guns. This makes your proposed attack much harder. The Russians at Kursk can almost defend everything. Now it becomes a brute force attack. You still need to find and fix the enemy. Choose where you are going to attack that gives you the best terrain cover. You know going into this attack that the Russians are going to have plenty of firepower. You will need to be able to use smoke and off map artillery fire for suppression of as many of the AT assets as you can. The German tanks will have to carry some of the infantry to allow it to move as quickly as possible across the dead zone. Moving quickly will help to keep the armor from getting killed too if it can get to cover in 15 seconds or less. Mad dashes work well in the game. Often the first shot will miss. Again, often the second vehicle gets killed. Move your infantry forward in rushes. Have them "run" for 50 meters and then hide. Let them rest and do it again. Anybody that is suppressed stays behind until they can run again. Tanks move forward as far as the enemy AT assets will allow. Then they pound the defenders. Give the defenders too many targets and most of them will get to the attack jump off point. Keep your infantry forces scattered as much as possible. That is hard to do since you need to have a concentration of firepower to assault the position when you get there. Do the best you can. T-34's will be a problem. In most scenarios they will have canister and can stop an infantry attack by themselves. German armor must take out any Russian tanks that show up. German engineers may need to breach the minefields but maybe not. It depends on the situation. If you need to go FAST then just go through them. If you have the time then breach them. While just moving through mines causes casualties so does giving the defender time to react to your choice of attack location. As the commander on site it is your call which is best at the time. The only hard and fast rule with drills, is that, there are no hard and fast rules with drills. Do whatever the enemy isn't expecting you to do. That will win you more games than doing the drill right every time and getting chopped to doll rags, because, the other guy didn't play by the same rules this time. Any indirect fire on AT guns will be worth it's weight in gold. Preferably before you expose your armor to his AT guns. This will be a bloody engagement because it will involve heavy forces in the open. Expect a tough and bloody fight.

What happened was that you didn't secure enough of the map to move the front line forward. Just moving into the village without taking alot of the terrain along the river will just isolate your front units. I've had that very same thing happen to me during playtests. You have to secure either the village or your bridgehead. Allowing them to defend themselves as the Russians counterattack your forces. It's not the game. It was the rate of your advance and where you went that the computer didn't give you credit for. This is not an easy operation to win. I hope you try it again and if you do advance as deep into the village and on your left flank on the hill as you can. See what that does for you.

Went and looked at your campaign. I mistook it for an operation. The premise is the same except that if I understand this correctly you are doing all the work that CM would do in an operation. Making the pertinent decisions for the continuance of the operation personally. How often does the defender have a hail of ATR fire available? Essentially always. Vehicles with 8mm sides cannot scout aggressively against hidden infantry defenses in steppe If your OOB allows for a "hail of ATR fire" then it isn't very historically accurate. I normally play the Russian side of battles so I see the ATR side of things as good as it gets. The Russians after early 1942 started mass producing them but the Germans never really did buy into the ATR game. These are the recon vehicles of both sides during this time period in the war. They were adequate for them to use and they are adequate for CM use as well if you remember that they are recon elements and not tanks. Recon elements move slowly and make extensive use of overwatch and terrain hugging techniques. I have seen these 8mm AC's that you seem to think of as sacrificial lambs live through some very fierce tank battles. If you want your recon to live act like you are in the lead AC and see how brave you get with them. The whole idea is to gain information not die trying. I agree that you can scout with half squads or even better your forces could include recon forces. That could include recon infantry squads. As for ranged fire not mattering, it is a product of an unrealistic excessive willingness to take casualties, to throw away infantry for one field and a tiny flag. You have just described Russian 1943 combat tactics in a single sentence. What ranged fire has going for it is stealth. It compounds the recon problem. At steppe ranges, light AT weapons (Russian ATRs, German 20mm Flak) are not going to be spotted when firing. Making thin light armor bad at recon. Unless your steppe maps are flat as a billiard table, and they shouldn't be, there are folds in the land and moderately rolling hills with gullies that are at times very steep sided. I do not drive on the tops of ridges and hills with my recon but act like I might want them to live for a turn or more. Extensive use of overwatch and terrain hugging will keep most of them alive. Interesting that you consider the recon units of the armies to be inadequate for the task of reconning infantry positions. The armies themselves upgraded their recon elements after the time of Kursk because they were too vulnerable to enemy AT assets. When the German spoke of holding fire until close in Russia, he was refering to what you'd do with the squad infantry portion of such a defense. Those are quiet in their trenches until the range to approaching infantry is good, and the threat of discovery if the defenders don't fire is imminent. After they fire, that group of attackers are stuck in a lethal zone. The engagement can then be short, making it hard for distant overwatch to help in time. Yes, that was exactly my point. Holding fire until such a range puts the attacker at an extreme disadvantage. You say they have limited ammo. But attackers cannot afford losing half a dozen men to every enemy MG and light mortar present, to take one field. In one battle maybe, not when there is field after field after field, as there is in reality (and in a campaign). Especially if their methods against the squad infantry involve dying a lot in the open at 100-200m, thus getting no better than a trade when the overwatch kills that little portion of the defenders. Here we need to clarify if you are only talking about German defenders and Russian attackers or what. If we are talking Russian attackers and the OOB is anything close to be historically accurate the Russians ABSOLUTELY can and did lose tremenous numbers of men in taking a single field. They thought nothing of doing so because casualties did't figure into their tactic doctrine. While we are at it, we need to clarify whether these hypothetical forces of yours, are mechanized or infantry. That makes a great difference whether or not what we are talking about is 8mm armoured AC's or infantry recon elements. You keep jumping back and forth on me from one to the other. When the attacker has better overall forces and armor superiority, he needs to be able to eat the defense. To inflict far greater casualties than he takes... Here, I find myself in the unique position of agreeing and disagreeing with you, all at the same time. The attacker does need to eat the defense, BUT he needs not inflict far greater casualites than he takes. Where did you get that? It is an established axiom of war that the attacker needs to have an attack ratio of 3-1 to be successful. That means that you are, THAT YOU ARE, going to take more casualties than the defender while taking those positions. Rarely, will an attacker ever take a position, that he didn't lose multiples more men attacking that position than the defender did defending it. And we here we are talking about attacking across open ground on top of that. No you will lose a lot of men. You just have to be careful that it doesn't cost you too many men that you can't continue to force your will on the defenders. The bar is higher than you suppose. You can't lose a third of the attacking force to get there. You can't lose anything really, unless you annihilate the defenders. You can take modest losses in any arm if you do achieve that. Not large ones in any one arm. You have to be able to do it ten times in a row with the same force, without running out of anything essential to the method used. That statement assumes that there is a continous line of strongpoints that must all be taken laterally. Why would you do that? The goal is to break the line in a particular place and then exploit the breach. Not to battle down the line one after another but to fix them in place as you drive by to the interior of the defense. As for canister, it is mostly misunderstood shrapnel in reality and ought to be HE. CM canister is not remotely realistic in its modeling. In my campaign, there won't be any. That is the great thing about CM you can make it anyway you want to. Cannister was used by the Russians and leaving it out takes a major tool that they originally had from the CM player. Your call though. The task is doable. But not by the methods Adam proposed, nor by the methods you proposed (which aren't much different than his for this portion of the task, only adding "scout first with light armor", which simply fails, in practice). If I understand what you are looking for is not actually a discussion on the tactics used in the battles of the Ukraine but a "drill" that ia a one size fits all glove for attacking some infantry strongpoints in the Ukrainian hills. It has been my experience that drills don't work well often. They have to modified to fit the actual situation of the moment. In your assessment of the correct drill if I understand this correctly it has to do with a FO that can't see anything because my recon didn't get through?! ...correct. The doctrinal solution is for an FO to bring down a barrage on the breech as the pioneers arrive to clear it. In 1943 the Russian answer to all minefields was to simply move over them. They did not breach minefields except during large scale operations that involved Front breaching of the German MLR. After that you just move on. Operation Bagration was the first time that Russian armored formations used mine rollers and that is June 1944 not July 1943. What you are quoting is German doctrinal solution. The Germans did believe in breaching minefields. Although there were exceptions, interestingly enough in regards to this discussion, at Kursk where the 505th Heavy Tank Battalion (Tiger) was ordered to drive over the Russian minefields to break the defense and continue the advance. See: http://www.geocities.com/armysappersforward/kursk.htm He needs not a few modest ATGs spread over individual forts all along the line, but a gun front. Where is the German defender going to get these guns in a divisional setting? The Russians would have no problem forming them almost at will. But by 1943 the Germans are short on everything most of all AT guns. Once again it matters if the German unit involved is an infantry or panzer formation. Defenders can't really afford to have this sort of thing everywhere. They have to anticipate where the attacker will send meaningful quantities of armor to lead attacks, and be waiting for them with a large number of capable guns. That is a head game. The attacker's first counter is simply to hit where they ain't by winning it. That involves intel, feints, probes. That page came from my book. What does the attacker want instead, if he knows the gun front is there? Actually he wants to go the other way. Only if he is forced to attack through the heavily defended zone will he attack here. The defender is trying his best to channel that attack right through the zone. As you say this is a head game. But also a recon game. We are back to battlefield intelligence. Is there another way? If there is the defender loses. As the attacker you need to KNOW if there is or not. Something I have rarely seen discussed, is an off timing attack, to freeze the defense in an area and make them believe that the attack is going there, when the real attack is actually set to come in turns later at a different point on the map. As the defense reacts to the original demonstrating attack the attacker now has a much better chance of breaking the line in another area that has softened because the defender has moved forces to the threatened area. This tactic seems to be very successful in the Ukrainian style terrain.