undead reindeer cavalry

bah, i think it has nothing to do with propaganda or heroic mindset. the ones with the heroic mindset are the fools who died three months ago and who wasted their panzer battalions in stupid frontal assaults against unrecced PAK-fronts. they are the antithesis of the brilliant 15 tank strong panzer divisions that achieve marvels with almost nothing. commanding and controlling a huge formation like a panzer division is extremely hard to do well. by default everything fails and goes wrong. you need something extra to make something or anything happen well or just ok. with these tiny 15 tank strong panzer divisions you have situation where everyone knows everyone and the status of the elements. there's more than enough real battle experience and chain of command is as clear as it gets. there's enough brain power to process the information to be able to understand and coordinate actions. combat elements are so small that they are able to react to new orders and information almost instantly. because the division is so weak, there's no room for foolish heroism. the opposite is the green almost up to TOE panzer division (ok, a Soviet tank division or early war tank corps is a better example) which is almost like a blind mammoth. everything takes great lengths of time to accomplish and there's always confusion. orders are issued without throughout understanding of the situation and orders are received mixed, conflicting and desperately late. when a battle rises, acts are not coordinated and it's just a huge SNAFU. the only thing that saves the day, if you are lucky enough, is the dumb overwhelming superiority in blind fire power.

i have no difficulties in believing it was real. you can read about it so often that it surely must have existed. as for reasons how it was possible on the tactical level, i suspect it's a combination of preferred methods per available assets, higher c3 to combat elements ratio, higher cohesion and the darwinian selection of the remaining combat assets. my impression is that 15 veteran Panzer IVs tend to do better than 45 green Panthers. when the Panthers finally have learned the ways of the land, they are down to those 15 runners themselves.

it sounds right. it's not that unusual to read about events where a company of panzers or a regiment of tanks goes up in flames in just two minutes. usually followed by a testimony on the lines of "suddenly there was an explosion and when i looked up i saw that the entire turret had disappeared! somehow i managed to crawl out of the tank/panzer. i had lost hearing and i looked in disbelief at the world around me. everything was happening as if in slow motion or in a dream. the field was full of burning, smoking and exploding tanks/panzers, the surviving crews trying to find cover amongst the wrecks. i couldn't believe i had survived the exposion, but there was no time to think about it now. somehow i managed to find cover in a small ditch. Ivan/Franz was there as well, with someone i didn't know who was missing half of his body - staring at me smiling with an empty look in his eyes. slowly my brains started to work again and there was nothing to do but cry out of frustration, anger and despair. what unbelievable waste! it was all over before we had even understood what had happened."

on tactical level a couple of platoons of panzers that lay an ambush will stop a tank regiment for a day or even destroy it. doctrinally the Soviets won't try to challenge those panzers and they will instead look for a panzer-free passage elsewhere for their tanks. they will try to set up ambushes on those panzers with PAK-fronts and SUs. Soviets were a bit shaky about panzer divisions after faring so badly against them during the first years. they vastly overestimated their numbers (unintentionally or not) and were perhaps a bit too passive when they faced them (later in war). some of it is silly, like when 15 Panzer IVs appear and as a consequence a tank army goes to defensive. of course they had reasons for it, i'm not saying it was cowardice or anything like that. economy of force, strategic-operational stance, chaos & confusion, events taking place on neighbouring sectors and all that. they were also hindered by the tightly preplanned and scheduled operations: when a detail went wrong it had potential for ruining everything around it, or at least causing confused inaction or even mindless carnage. this wasn't such an issue later in the war, but in the early days it was one crucial aspect of the great fails. also worth noting is that sometimes a tank corps means just 50 tanks, so that indimitating "OMG entire XXIV Tank Corps kthxbye!!!" marker on the map may in fact be quite impotent on the ground (just like it was with the panzer divisions, though it was a lot more common for the PDs). you can try the tactical aspect by creating a 1km map in CMBB. make a road go south-north on the eastern edge and put in a large unified area of scattered trees on the western edge. mark the road and terrain around it with a good number of German TRPs. for about first 500 meters put something that blocks LOS between the road and the scattered trees. put a couple of platoons of panzers into those scattered trees with covered arcs set to almost zero. distance to road should be around 600-800 meters, depending on panzer models. put 40 typical Soviet tanks on the road at the edge with LOS block (make them arrive as reinforcement if it gets too tight). orders those tanks to move by the road to the other edge. when a good part of those tanks are visible to the panzers in the scattered trees, at that 600-800 meter range, and with the Soviets moving on top of those TRPs, remove the covered arcs and open fire at those tanks. borg spotting ruins some of the effect, but it works good enough to showcase how it goes.

i have never seen videos of such simulations. armored division deployed in a march column can be around 100 km long, so creating such a graphical simulation would not be a trivial task. you could try to look for films shot from passing aircraft to get a sense of scale.

they also sent some heavily damaged precious models (like Panthers at Kursk) back to Germany for repairs. sometimes these tanks would turn out to be nothing but empty hulls. the rest having been cannibalized, like you wrote. the great majority of losses would still be those listed in short term repair (4-14 days).

yes, if your positions are overrun i am not suggesting someone would go in just to rescue the MG.

they have something else waiting as well, if they just left the MG and run MG is quite easy to carry. especially something like MG42 that can be broken down to pieces. even a Maxim moves almost at running speed, if you have three guys carrying it. ammo bearers are members of the squad, section or platoon. i wouldn't be so sure about that...

sorry for my failing english & minimal quoting in the post. i was talking about panzer losses. panzer losses to AT gun fire. not AT gun losses.

you need to consider national doctrine as well. not all weapons are born equal. some are privileged and considered more important than the others. for example for Germans it were the MGs and mortars. guys with rifles were little more than glorified ammo bearers. as long as there was one man left, the MG was firing. leaving the MG was probably considered something unthinkable.

usually enemy advances while you are being suppressed by artillery fire. when the enemy advances, the defending ATG's position may become tactically exposed, useless or otherwise less than optimal. to a lesser point (i'm not sure this matters at all), it was easier to prepare protected positions for field artillery, because stealth and local fields of fire were not that important. usually most of artillery prep fires fall within a couple of kilometers of the frontline. it specifically targets all located enemy key positions, like those of AT guns. known enemy artillery batteries did receive fire, but not as much. counter-battery warfare existed on a different level (operational-strategic, not tactical) and it was a slow war of attrition. other than that, it did happen with ATGs as well, if we are talking about enemy indirect artillery fires. what comes to direct fires, the crew will abandon the gun only when they really have to and when that happens the situation won't change within a couple of minutes. usually they die before their courage fails / sense prevails, because of their sense of duty for their comrades (infantry) who depend on them. usually they won't leave the gun until they are over run, run out of ammo, the infantry falls back around them or they receive orders to do so.

most of the losses to the AT guns would be temporary mission kills that get recovered. as for armor-AT tactics, Germans tried massing their armor in large wedges, with heavily armored variants leading the wedge where available. so in theory, even if 80% of your forces consists of armor killable by enemy AT guns, it would be the other 20% that would be taking the majority of enemy fire, making the majority of enemy AT fire ineffective. in theory.

these suggestions were on two separate posts. if you combine them, you still won't have a proper scenario, because there's no play testing etc., tho the end result may be OK anyway.

you don't have to use random maps in QBs. you can choose a human designed map that will be used in the QB.

don't let computer choose her units, if you play combined arms or similar type, because she is programmed to cherry pick her armor. it destroys all the fun for battles with tanks, other than 1944/45, because you face the best armor available. for example for me the true fun for 1941 is playing with BTs, T-26s, 38Ts, 37mm Panzer-IIIs, short Panzer-IVs and such what comes to tanks. if you still want the uncertainty of the forces you meet, create a number of quick battles and save them without playing them. name the save game files so that they tell the general battle type. then after some time (during which you forget which game had what troops), play those games in random order.

1/3 replacements is about the same scale as that of the Finnish 18th division stats, as far as i am familiar with it - which i am not to any greater lengths. though i don't know how US repair services worked in June/July. if i guesstimate the TOE, and sum up both repaired items and transfers & evacuations, the loss percentages for the Finnish 18th div would be something like: rifles - 139% LMGs - 75% MGs - 157% for all these types, the number of captured enemy equipment is higher that 100% of the TOE, so it does pump the percentages up somewhat in the field. it would not be hard to see the required replacements to be within the general scale of 1/3 of the TOE. i.e. if i pull up a figure from my hat and say third of the t&e would mean replacements from higher level depots (other thirds would be equipment fixed at higher level repair shops and evacuated working equipment), the replacement % would be: rifles - 33% LMGs - 17% MGs - 37% my gut feeling for the Finnish numbers is that the great majority of weapon losses are caused by wear & tear, not by enemy combat activity. one way, with tongue in cheek & just for fun, to try to find the battlefield life expectancy for these weapons, in these conditions etc, would be to go for rounds shot/weapon loss or units of fire/weapon loss route, as the numbers of ammo expenditure are known. for the division i have discussed, the number of required rifle caliber rounds fired to lose one own weapon of the type rifles - 300 rounds LMGs - 10 000 MGs - 20 000 to lose 1% of the TOE for the type rifles - 15 000 LMGs - 28 000 MGs - 13 500 so if the ammo expenditure of your identical division would be 60 000 rifle caliber rounds for certain period during which you were the attacker with success etc etc, you would still lose 200 rifles, 6 LMGs and 3 MGs = 4% rifle strength, 2% LMG strength and 4.5% MG strength. yes yes, not scientific at all, all bound to other arms of the unit etc etc etc.

i have always liked those. just in case there are some Finns who aren't aware of it, Finnish National Archives have scanned a good number of Finnish WW2 war diaries and they are freely accessible from nat arch website at http://digi.narc.fi/digi/dosearch.ka?atun=65.SARK . currently the site contains 3321 war diaries for Winter War and 20450 war diaries for Continuation War & Lapland War. there are also some battle reports and such. there are diaries for units down to company and separate platoon (e.g. mortar platoon) level. so for example search for war diaries for infantry regiment 49, for continuation war period, gives 109 different war diaries to study. i advice caution if you are interested in this kind of stuff. the archives can cause social and psychological problems. it's addicting to compare division, regiment, battalion and company level notes for the same events. diaries also contain tons of "interesting" stuff you never get to read from books. there's also the human element, as it soon becomes painfully obvious that some guy is actually writing those notes, especially what comes to all kinds of attachments like orders and reports delivered by runners, written in comical hasty handwriting and using "relaxed" language, and occasional "stains" and all sorts of "unofficial" notes and drawings made out of boredom and frustration. the downside is that some guys have really hideous handwriting which makes reading a pain (higher level units naturally use typewriters).

on the contrary. sounds like it's the same good old stuff more seriously speaking, i've got a feeling that CMN will be the kind of game some of the old fans wanted CMSF to be.

ha, still got that d. i can certainly hear what you are saying. fair enough.

Patton's drive was indeed great. i really like it. too bad his superiors forced him to stop it. there was no shortage of supplies as such. logistics was artificially made an issue by sending the supplies elsewhere, thus reinforcing failures. i'm not asking for gambling. i'm aware that Allies tried to create deep penetrations a number of times. there's just such a huge gap between a fail and a win. i'm not of the opinion that Germans would have performed well in Normandy. on tactical they did very well when they were defending, but their counter-attacks, especially on operational level, were highly stupid and ordered by cowardly yes men. i'm rather of the opinion that Germans helped Allies get along easy in Normandy by being so bad on operational level. what comes to your armor numbers, even if we look at the whole June-August period, German total armor losses, of all types, are somewhere around 1500-2000 pieces. meanwhile Western Allied losses for the same period, just for M4 only, are 1700 pieces. what comes to Bagration, Soviet irrecoverable losses were smaller than those of Germans and if we are talking about tanks they lost less tanks than Western Allies in June-August.

because you are being far too careful. you don't want deep blitzkrieg style penetrations, you want the whole front to move together. it's bound to be slow. first hand accounts tend to come out the same for all sides and nations, especially if accounts come from defensively minded or less experienced men. i'm not aware of any German qualitative superiority of armour in Normandy. by 1944 Russian armour is not inferior and German divisions are typically far from "combat proven" (unless you mean it in humoristic sense). i'm betting all my money on the superiority of Russian operational/strategic art. they are the polar opposite of the allies in Normandy. deep, fast, narrow penetrations.

if we are talking about US in Normandy & beyond, i think they did relatively well on tactical level. their morbid operational slowness, if not outright reactionary paralysis, comes from that strange strategy of theirs. i think JasonC is flattering that strategy way too much by calling it attritionist. for a guy who sometimes seems to value Clausewitz, i don't get how he can speak positively about a strategy that totally lacks any concept of center of gravity. i think the strategy was just wimpy, simple as that. they were scared about flanks etc and allowed politics etc get in the way. where as their doctrine on higher levels was decades behind Soviet operational art, i think they did much better on tactical level. i find your ideas strange. mind telling me more how you have reached your conclusions?

if you want the numbers, just do a search on this forum (CMAK). i recall the weekly army totals & breakdown by causes being listed and discussed. the non-penetrating hit stuff comes from a book called "Tank Tactics - From Normandy to Lorraine". Allied tank losses were researched by OR guys already during the war & especially just after it. much better than anything i have seen coming from the German side.

i'm being serious. he is stopped only because he runs out of gas, right? then when he has stopped, German panzer counter-attacks at Arracourt are defeated easily, right? where's the joke?

there' some good stuff in there, and it's all interesting to read, but a lot of it is nothing but laughable.