blue division

Quote: 'Oh look, a real historian telling us that the Red Army only won the war because of trucks. ' Well YES, actually. How do you move two hundred miles in your country? I do it by car or train actually. Same as the Russian infantry in 1944/5.

Bigduke6: I think you are overlooking the fact that all western observers who over the years have seen the Russian infantry closely at war have said: Their ability to endure tremendous hardship and to keep fighting. This has been the case since at least the Crimea in the 1850's, through the first world war and into the second. This is how they held onto Stalingrad and sucked in all of the German reserves, and eventually encircled all of the German troops there. They didn't give up and run away. Germans always commented on this from the first day of the war - Russian soldiers would often fight to the end when they were in static defences such as forts, cities etc. I would say that the Germans defeated themselves at Stalingrad. Anyone with any sense would have stayed well clear of any large city and simply bypassed it. At the end of the day, it just contains infantry with very limited supplies, and you just bypass and cut it off. They have nowhere to go. This is not to say that the Russians were bad soldiers, that can't be true otherwise how could they have done what they did? But the point is they were limited severely by a lack of leadership at the squad level, a limitation that continues right through to the end of the war and beyond. The Germans commented on the exceptional willingness of the young Russian platoon leaders to put themselves in danger - they had terrible casualty rates. They also commented however that they weren't very flexible in fast moving situations. German training always stressed the importance of flexibilty when in fast moving battles. IT was only when Hitler got involved and told everyone to stand and fight. And that suited the Red Army much better. What gets them through is high morale and sheer numbers. They were after all fighting for the existence of their own country on home turf.

Every encirclement requires a tought fight initially. Everyone knows this. To retate this would be restating the obvious.

Quote : 'Rubbish - the railroads were rebuilt at a rate of 0-30km per track a day during advances. ' i'm very dubious about this figure - you sure it isn't light railway for artillery?

Sigh... To say the obvious, Bagration was obviously achieved by infantry and tanks moving forward and shooting at the enemy. That is obvious. It is war. The point I was making was that to move 2,000,000 soldiers and 6000 tanks westwards by 200 miles requires trucks. Lots of them. And if you multiply 200 miles depth by 500 miles long, you get many thousands of miles. That is the amount of territory that had to be consolidated by the Red Army. And T34's are not the all conquering SUV's you portray them as. They were crudely made and the mechanicals on them such as the engines had to be thrown away after a very short space of time. You don't seem to appreciate the importance of logisitics in modern warfare.

I don't trust accounts from either Germans or Russians. I just know you can't sustain an offensive for six months that covers thousands of miles that doesn't use motorized transport i.e. trucks. It is well known that German accounts are flawed as the Generals who wrote them wanted to gain favour with their captors. As for Russians, well we know that anyone who didn't toe the line ended up in the Gulag. Accounts such as these cannot be trusted. You give Stalingrad as an example, but where do trucks fit into that? The battle was fought in a relatively small area compared to Bagration. The Russian drive on each side of the encirclement was surely no more than about 100 miles say. The troops in Stalingrad itself got there by boat via railway. The Russians were fighting in their interior across good lines of communication, and the opposite was true of the Germans. To compare Stalingrad with Bagration is a bit odd. You seem to be moving a bit off subject there. I think you will find by the end of the battle of Stalingrad both sides were exhausted. The Russian infantry was worn out, and their tanks needed refitting. You can't drive a tank across country in freezing conditions without it sooner or later breaking down. Tanks are simply not very good at covering large distances, not matter how 'reliable' they are considered. That is when you need trucks, to bring up your engineers with their bridging equipment, the tank workshops to replace the worn out engines on your T34's and your mobile soup kitchens to feed your soldiers. Not to mention the thousands of tons of ammuntion that must be brought forward in such a large offensive. So if Stalingrad is comparable, why didn't the Russians simply march all the way to Berlin in 1943? Two reasons: (1) the German Army hadn't been defeated in the field as an organisation. It had lost an Army, but it was still standing. It could still manoeuver and it still had reserves. (2) The Russians didn't have the ability to encircle and thereby destroy the Germans on their own terms. As long as the Germans fought intelligently, using their superior movement, they could always sidestep the Russians. Stalingrad happened because Hitler stupidly gave up the advantage of better mobility that the Germans had. Fighting the Russians in a static way gave away their advantage. It wasn't until 1944 that the Germans were finally defeated. 1945 was merely a pushing back the remnants of their last reserves. Also, the Red Army simply didn't have the capacity to cover the distances covered in Bagration. At Stalingrad, they ground to halt after whatever it was, say a 200 mile drive. Once the war entered 1944, it was all about who had the most of anything. It didn't matter who had the best troops. For example, I can have the bext German infantry but it is then squashed by Russian heavy artillery firing an enormous barrage at it. Or say an Allied heavy bomber dropping 1000 pound bombs on its position. In Bagration, the Russians bypassed the Germans without having to fight them. And that is the smart way to fight wars.

100,000 wasn't enough (I don't know the total figure but that sounds close - it was a huge number). But it is still an awful lot. It definetly wasn't all just trucks that moved the Red Army. But 100,000 trucks moves an awful lot of food and ammo (not to mention troops) a day. From what I have heard, their Recon units often rode any old horse they could get there hands on, unlike what is modeled in Combat Mission. Many accounts of the first siting of a Russian soldier away from the action it would be to see him on some old nag stolen from a peasant. German officers often looked down on this and called the Russian columns 'mongol hordes'.

seems like hugging the map end is a favourite tactic for defending units, particularly German armour. I have seen it used by experienced players all the time - they tend to use Tank hunters such as STUG's with the long (L48) 75mm gun. Very difficult to take out unless you use an indirect approach, use lots of smoke etc. It's just one of the gamey tactics that works consistently.

well at the moment mg pillboxes and heavy MG's and 57mm AT guns in trenches seem to be very effective in the desert. the pillbox has the advantage that it has an almost limitless quantity of ammo. Very good at slowing down infantry.

Does 40mm have a good effect on infantry? How about static defences such as MG pill boxes?

I mean in a flat environment in the western desert - as i said in the question. The weather of course will by dry and clear. it is a defensive battle. there, can i put it any clearer?

Any opinions on the best defensive units in the Desert (the western desert rather than Tunisia - it's a lot flatter).

'Studebaker ...helped make Soviet mechanised maneuver somewhat more mobile' . Compared to walking or using horses, yes, you could say that! Especially on a fron that streched for thousands of miles! 'But it was, at least according to the Soviets themselves, far from decisive.' Oh dear - you talk about American propaganda... and you have just come out with one straight from Stalins mouth... The reason the Russians say this is because to have acknowledged the American trucks as a factor would be to highlight the failure of the Soviet system to provide motor transport for the Red Army. This would be a direct criticism of Stalin himself. Enough to get yourself shot or sent to the Gulag. Remember, the bolshevik party had spent years telling the Russian people that the Communist system was the best. To acknowledge that it was unable to provide modern transport for it's own Army in a life or death conflict was totally unacceptable to the leadership. That is why they say 'American trucks - not that important - didn't really need them'. It's because they don't want to go there and talk about WHY they needed American trucks in the first place. To do so would that the West had Detroit, and the Soviet Union had - well, not much apart from crude tractor factories that were able to tanks as well. They were basically still bakward compared to the West. 'The key to success of the Red Army offensives was the Soviet ability to concentrate force at the point of the attack' Yes, and how do you concentrate forces ... only with thousands of trucks! You try moving 250,000 troops over hundreds of miles and keeping them supplied. It can ONLY be done with trucks. (Railroads have all been torn up by the Germans, remember, and will take years to rebuild). 'there's a significantly reduced need to keep the beans and bullets moving forward.' An infantry division of 17,000 men takes up 10 miles of road, back to back. It uses far more transport than the equivalent SUPPLY column for another unit. You have got it the wrong way around - to switch entire units around takes up more road - you have to pass unit through the other - creating traffic jams. It is easier to use one unit and keep it supplied. So the Russians were actually IN MORE need of good transport using this method than a western way of fighting. 'Russian infantryman was expected to survive a week on what he carried on his back'. The Russian tactics at the end of the war were to advance and keep advancing until you were told to stop. To maintain the advance the Red Army lived off the land. Why not? There were very few German units in Poland and Western Russia to stop them in 1944, and they had no ability to counterattack as they were so thinned out. Why not just keep marching? This isn't really related to the use of trucks. They were doing there own thing elsewhere in the rear areas, bringing more units up to the battle area. One last point - you try walking or using a horse and cart and adancing from say Minsk in Byelorussia to the Vistula in Poland. You have about six months to do it. Then do it across a wasteland where there is nothing to eat as all the crops have been burnt and all the livestock sluaghtered or transported westward. There is no shelter as all the houses are destroyed and no railroad as it has been torn up by the retreating Germans. There are hardly any real roads and where there are they have been sabotaged or mined. All the bridges are blown up too. And all the time you are having to fight retreating German units. Think you don't need trucks? I rest my case.

Your arguments about equipment and how it affected the war are a little overstated. As soon as the Russians received large quantities of American trucks in 1943 they started building the ability to deeply penetrate the German rear - and allow the infantry and infantry to keep up with the tanks and the whole package supplied. Combine this with the German Army in the East being seriously thinned out by Hitler to deal with the threats in Italy and France, and you had a recipe for disaster. Remember, the German Army was still largely using horses and carts to move about at the time of Bagration. So all the Russians had to was trick the Germans to sending there mobile reserves to the Ukraine while they struck in the North. When this worked, the German infantry divisions in the North were doomed. The Russians simply bypassed them on their new General Motors trucks. This was easy - the German troops were spread so thinly there would be 20-30 miles between units. Once bypassed, the German troops had no hope of relief. Goodbye Army Group Centre. Nothing at all to do with troop quality. The Germans had simply lost the battle before it had even started. This is why the non-Nazi German Generals pleaded with Hitler to end the war in ealry 1944.

The point is, the VG's were raised by Himmler as his Replacement Army. The old German Army only raised 60,000 men per month - they were still choosey about who they recruited. This didn't go down well with Hitler. Hitler demanded more, and Himmler being the man he was was only too glad to oblige by recruiting any old person he could get his hands on. Himmler, remember was only too glad to expand his empire and reduce the role of the Army. It also pandered to Hitlers prejudice against the Army. Hitler also knew that no-one (not even Goring) would say no to Himmler when he came knocking for more men. Himmler, being in charge of the Gestapo and pretty much all of the State Security services by 1944 was not the man to say no to. Naturally, Himmler swept up all the no-hopers that the Army weren't interested in before. And they were pressed into his own VG divisions. Remember, in the Third Reich there wasn't such a thing as 'policy' most of the time. It was whatever Hitler pronounced that day, and if he said to Himmler to raise a new Army, then that is what he did. There was always a race between Hitlers aides to be the most favoured. So they were all sycophants, and it wasn't whether the order from the Fuhrer made any sense, but just doing it unquestioningly that was what gained you favour. I don't think there was any policy there, just desperation on Hitlers part and a total lack of any morality on the part of Himmler. He just packed the VG divisions with canon fodder.

The Germans had no armour at Arnhem? What are you talking about??? There were loads of medals given out for Paras taking on German tanks - sometimes these were Tigers. They took on tanks with light infantry weapons such as PIAT's. mortars etc. They didn't knock out the tanks, just rattled the crew enough to make them withdraw. Which is about all you could expect in the cicumstances. Don't know what history you have been reading...

I think you overrate the German Army in late 1944 when the VolksGrenadiers were formed. It had been defeated on all fronts - and had largely been destroyed. hence : 'He [Hitler] reacted to it by immediately putting into effect a series of drastic "Total War" measures, designed to supply him with additional forces for a final counteroffensive. By lowering the draft age to 16 years and extending it to include the 50-year-olds and by combing out the home front and armed forces, he put an additional three quarters of a million men under arms. He thus built up a new strategic reserve consisting of 25 Volksgrenadier divisions and at leas 6 panzer divisions. These were raised and trained under the newly appointed commander of the Replacement Army, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler. I would like to add that the VG divisions were not given much artillery - they were given lots of sub standard automatic weapons that were being rushed out from hundreds of small workshops across Germany (part of the 'Total War' drive by Speer). So that's why I said WWI veterans (guys in their 50's), desk bound soldiers (clerks, cooks, garisson staff, airmen without aricraft, sailors without ships, soldiers with a disability but who could still walk and fire a gun etc.), poor weapons (shodily made MP40's). Perhaps some of the VG divisions were lucky in that they had enough real soldiers from other destroyed units to fill out their ranks to a decent standard. But most were formed in the most ad-hoc manner, for example 1 week training and being equipped in the Ardenne just before going into battle. After the Ardenne, their strength collapsed even further. As some observers commented from regular units, all they had was high morale. Nobody seriously expected them to do much. I think a lot of 'talking up' of the VG divisions goes on because it was they who were involved in the Ardenne. But they were a seriously reduced force compared to 1943 Wehrmacht infantry division. Yuo have got to remember - the Wehrmacht was shattered in summer 1944. All that was left was the pieces.

To give my opinion - and it is one of many... Quick battles: are good for learning Combat Mission are not so good for reality they can be one sided meeting engagements on them are hopeless difficult to get the right balance are different nearly every time - can be pretty exciting Scenarios: not so good for learning sometimes - they are less open ended are more balanced - so can be quite plodding if players are evenly matched allow you to play meeting engagements fairly and evenly with no advantages allow advantages to players if you cheat and play against the computer before playign by email anyway those are my thoughts. i'm sure somebody disagrees with them out there. As someone else has said, it is down to what floats your boat.

As far as I know, the Wehrmacht in the field relied largely on horse drawn transport. That is, to move around the standard infantry formations, who were the bulk of the army. Sure, mechanized divisions had more transport, but they were a minority. And as the war progressed and fuel became scarcer, the German Army relied more and more on horses. So to ask 'why don't the Germans have .50 cal's?' is the wrong question. You try moving something that heavy around on horse and carts. How would you mount it on a farm cart? The whole thing would shake apart when you fired it! Also, why move from the standard cartrdge (7.92 mm or so) that you have always used to something that is non-standard and far, far heavier to transport. Remember, the Germans had to produce as many weapons as possible with the least hassle. They were still using captured equipment until 1944, when at last German industry moved onto a 'total war' footing. Why waste time and resources making 50 cal mg's, when the MG42 was such a light, powerful weapon that perfectly suited the German infantry - that is, the vast bulk of the German armed forces. The MG42 was developed with the Russian front in mind - the incredibly high rate of fire was to break up human wave attacks. For this purpose it has never been bettered. Look at the American M60, a derivative from the MG42 that was requested by the US Army after there current squad weapon the BAR did not have the rate of fire needed to deal with Chinese human wave attacks. Look at the Pakistani army of today, that still uses MG42 copies to deal with the massed ranks of the Indian army. The MG42 as an infantry squad weapon has probably never been bettered. The .50 cal on the other hand was best used on aircraft as it had the range to hit other aircraft, as well as the hitting power to break up the airframe and punch through engine blocks etc. It is too heavy to be used by infantry in anything other than the static defensive role. The Americans love putting all the options they can possibly have on their SUV's, and so it is with their Armoured vehicles. This includes roof mounted .50 cals. A roof mounted .50 cal is useless I would have thought for any other purpose than suppressing infantry at extreme ranges. To expose yourself atop the tank/vehicle and fire the .50 cal would be like having a big neon 'shoot me' sign above your head to anyone within a mile. I have read of lots of accounts of the gunner being shot down almost immediately when using the 50 cal in a firefight. I can remember one account of the M103 APC being used in Vietnam against the Vietcong. The US advisers believed that the ability of the .50 cal to shoot through the huts / dykes in and around villages would force the guerillas to run. But all the Vietcong did was hide and pick off the 50 gunners one by one. The South Vietnamese troops had to retreat. The same thing has been seen in Somalia and Iraq - that is the unsuitability of the 50 cal to be used in real life conditions. And nobody knew more than the German army of 1942 about what sort of squad weapon a modern infantry unit needs. It needs to be light, portable, and with a good rate of fire. None of which the .50 cal is.

Most definetely tall pines. If you have ever been to Turkey or Greece, the landscape and climate is very similar. I can also remember the film 'Cross of Iron', set in Ukraine 1943, which showed a German platoon spending a lot of time in a pine forest (the film starts in one).

The terms 'Fusilier' and 'Grenadier' as far as the British Army from as far back as the War of The Spanish Succesion in 1702. Basically, a Fusilier was a member of the line infantry armed with a rifle. A grenadier was a guy with a rifle and a bag of primitive grenades - light the fuse on a big iron ball and throw it at the enemy. The grenadiers were handpicked on the grounds of being the tallest of men physically - just think, throwing those grenades must have been like throwing a shotput. I would also expect them to have higher morale and discipline than a standard rifle man. They were really the shock troop infantry of 16th century warfare. The use of the term Grenadier and Fusilier has survived in Britain because of regimental history and tradition. The Grenadiers were obsolete by the time of Napoleon - muskets would have cut them down long before they could do anything.

I agree. Volks Grenadiers were raised from 3rd rate reservists - i.e. seriously sounded, veterans from the first world war, Desk bound soldiers etc. They were rarely given heavy equipment - they were sort of a light infantry force. A lot of their equipment was stuff looted from the French and Polish armies. Any German equipment was often of poor quality. Some units were given a few assault guns - this was rare and probably just for show. All the regular soldiers knew the VolksGrenadiers would run away or surrender at the first sign of trouble - why give them valuable equipment? These units were regarded as liabilities by everyone, including the leaders of the Third Reich. They were intended to stiffen the resolve of the civilian population to fight the expected invasion.