Der Alte Fritz
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Posts posted by Der Alte Fritz
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Haircut - yes or no? Remember you have to look at it from the Russian's perspective, to them a battalion was 300 men, a regiment 900 men, a division 6,000. Tank Battalions field 21 tanks on a good day which is less than a German Company. Units 60% under establishment = pretty normal.
So applying that sort of logic a German Regiment becomes a Battalion with a company of tanks in support and a platoon of Tigers. Given this force was also attacking the Farm to the north as the main point of attack, this flank guard may have been even smaller.
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Well yes I am still sticking with CMBB and CMAK(ETO) as my main games. I would tend to agree that it is the scale that I find appealing, CMSF seemed to step down a level, as you spent more time managing squads and I think this is the wrong direction to go. I would have liked to see more chain of command (also to counter borg spotting) and less micro management - getting down to level One to place you tank (and the tank commander cannot dismount to scout ahead) always flummoxed me. I really want to be able to direct a platoon to go over there and they would be able to do it on their own - even with a command delay.
CM2:N I will certainly give a go but I think the three month time frame will rapidly become very constricting especially as it moves to the Eastern Front - 90 days out of 1400 days of combat in the East.
I am always perplexed by TOW, it must appeal more to gamers as it had a real 'bang and your dead' kind of feel to it. But it does seem to have a following so there must be something there.
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So here we are sitting waiting for the release of CM:Normandy and with TOW:Kursk just out. Is it time to abandon CMBB in favour of these new games or is TOW as broken as before ( I read about Wespe's spinning round and and round as they engage planes with their main armament) and what are peoples reactions to CMSF (which I have bought but never got into).
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Yes I would go with the 8" gun as a deterrent. The account mentions the guns firing on a number of different targets, harassing fire on the cross roads, defensive fire in front of the position, etc. So this was aimed fire by a OP rather than some sort of planned barrage.
Reminds me of George McC's Strachwitz scenario where fire from 8" guns came in from the cruiser Prinz Eugen into a town full of Russian Shermans. Lots of killed vehicles but also lots of mobility hits from near misses.
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well it looks like PzIII long and PzIV long and then later on some Tigers with PzIII short in support. At this stage of the battle the Bn was reinforced by 6 T-34s but the main factor seems to have been the artillery driving off the infantry and the Tigers then not being able to get forward due to possible tank hunter assault.
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The reason that I am interested in this account is that it is a relatively rare Soviet account at Battalion level. It can be read at http://web.archive.org/web/20050911174927/www.redarmystudies.net/listing.htm look for No9 1983.
In short it describes how on the 12th March 1943 a battalion of the 1288th RR with 324 soldiers, 244 rifles, 36 submachine guns, 8 DP and 6 Maxim machine guns, 4 AT Rifles, 2 45mm AT guns and 8 82mm mortars backed up by 4 76mm Divisional guns (acting both as artillery and in the last resort as AT guns) and 2 203mm guns. This group occupies a patch of open steppe above a small vilage of Rogan on the Kharkov road. They were one of a string of isolated battalion positions along the river trying to stop the German advance from cutting off the Soiet units leaving the town.
They hold out all day, being bombed by aircraft, attack by tanks and Pz Grenadiers and finally pull back that night after being attacked by 6 heavy tanks that fially break into the position. They claim to have have been attacked by a Battalion of tanks and a Regt of Infantry and destroyed 17 tanks and 300 soldiers. This was not a prepared position so would have had trenches but few mines of fixed defences, so this seems a very good score.
I can hear the harumpfing even now from defenders of the SS honour. From the account it seems the main German attack went in 2km to the north against another battalion at Rogan Farm which is pushed back. This attack further south may have been seen as a flank guard action and then later a more determined effort to clear the road.
Does anyone know of any accounts from the other side of the hill.
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It is the start of the Eastern Front deployment that I am interested in ie the fighting around Kharkov in March 1943.
"In Early February 1943 Totenkopf was transferred back to the Eastern Front as part of Erich von Manstein's Army Group South. The division, as a part of SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser's II SS Panzerkorps, took part in the Third Battle of Kharkov, blunting the Soviet General Konev's offensive. During this campaign, Theodor Eicke, while flying above enemy lines in a Fiesler Storch spotter aircraft, was shot down and killed. The division mounted an assault to break through enemy lines and recover their commander's body, and thereafter Eicke's body was buried with full military honours. Hermann Priess succeeded Eicke as commander."
I have an account of the fighting around Kharkov from Vizh which recounts the actions of a Russian Infantry Battalion engaged against Totenkopf. It refers to 'heavy tanks' which I took to be PzIV.
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What tanks and vehicles would they have been using at this stage of the War?
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All the files should be at Green As Jades Mod website
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Why not post it at the Proving Grounds?
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"When we can get quality military publishers to make maps as outstanding as those in Esposito and Elting's historical atlas of the Napoleonic wars, on far more obscure topics, I find that excuse less than compelling."
The original for this book was produced in 1964 when book publishing had a very different landscape. I am not saying that quality books cannot be produced, but they will tend to be books about Hitler, the SS, Napoleon or by block buster authors or have sponsorship. For instance we did a very large and glossy book on Stalin's Navy, full colour, maps, line drawing, plans etc. It had sponsorship from the Russian Navy and the support of the US Navy in the form of a large pre-publication order.
I am afraid that David Glantz and his area of study falls squarely into the Academic arena, both by his writing style and by his subject matter and as such his books will always be limited to the constrains I outlined above. Sales of all Davids books (from all of his publishers) are on the small side. However as editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies he has gained an international reputation outside his normal professional military readership but again this is squarely in the academic field.
The pressures on academic publishers have to be recognised. The rise of the internet means students no longer buy books in the numbers they used to, libraries have followed suit and now that journals are online as well, it is hard for academic publishers to draw on the revenue streams that they have relied on for years. This is why you have seen so many mergers of companies and why even companies such as the mighty Cambridge University Press now relies mainly on freelance editors and have sacked their staff of full time editors. Cost cutting is the name of the game these days. At Taylor and Francis over a five year period at the end of the 90s, they took over nearly 30 other publishers. They did not increase their own staff at all. Their sales reps went from carrying 150 titles a year to over 800, again no increase in staff.
This is the reason that the quality of academic books has been falling since 2000.
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Since I used to work for Frank Cass publishing many of David Glantz's books, I can tell you exactly the reason.
Cost.
In our case as an academic publisher, we would print around 3,000 copies for the World market, half of whom would be sold to academic libraries, about a quarter would be sold to wargamers or amateur historians, at time of publication and the remainder would dribble out over the next 15 years or so. The author would supply the photos and maps, the dust jacket would be produced in house and for a good selling book we might have a budget of £50 for a picture (since Hulton Getty sells its pictures for around £500, we would have to beg borrow and steal from military collections and donate them the £50). There was no budget for maps, a decent graphic designer might do you one for £100 upwards but a really detailed one was either supplied by the author or beyond our budget.
In the late 1990s with the arrival of new technology meant that we could move to "Print on Demand" (ie print each book as it was ordered by essentially a giant photocopier) which cut capital outlay (ie stock sitting in expensive warehouses) but still did not help book production costs as this was a more expensive method of printing and you still had your editorial/design costs up front.
Even bigger market books such as the ones we did for HM Government - like the official history of the Battle of Britain, only got a few maps (again supplied by the RAF) but did get colour dust jackets and better quality paper.
The books you get reflect the size of the market. Military books are a small but at the end of the day specialist market when compared to cookery books which are large glossy sell, hundreds of thousands and get designers to work on them. A publisher could never afford a cartographer, they would simply use and existing map and pay the copyright fee.
Publisher like Frank Cass are under great pressure, which is why we were bought out by multi-national Taylor and Francis who put 2 editors onto our books whereas we had employed about 12. Economies of scale. I now run a guesthouse.
I loved my work with a historical publishing house. I met spies, partizans, soldiers, admirals, men who had stood next to Hitler, a elderly English man who rolled back his sleeve and showed me the tattoo on his arm from Auschwitz, men and women who had run and hid in the woods from the SS in Russia, resistance fighters from Holland, people who had produced war winning weapons.
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On thing to be aware of is that several of David Glantz's recent books are taken from his earlier work
"Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War"
a planned 8 volume (up to volume 6 now) self published work which is still continuing. Whole chapters have been cut and pasted into some of his recently published books such as "After Stalingrad: The Red Army's Winter Offensive, 1942-1943". I bought this and found that so much material was the same, that I sent it back and got a refund.
Probably one reason why the maps are so poor is that they are photocopies of the originals in the Russian archives and not drawn from scratch.
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John
In the 1990s I worked for the publisher handling the publishing of the Offical History of the WW2 for the British Government. Each book had to be signed off by Tony Blair himself.
We always had huge amounts of material from the Navy and a good selection from the RAF but we never got anything from the Army. Neither the brass nor the Official Army historian has any interest in history and in getting stuff published, even in books, let alone the web (The Navy was keen on this as was the RAF). So nothing ever changes the anti-academic bias in the British Army continues evenas it did in the days of Hobart, Fuller and Wavell.
The only reason we got the Falklands history published was that the Navy (and Marines) got the job done. Again the Army was not interested.
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John
You should look at:
Sharp - Soviet Armoured Tactics in WW2
Caza - Soviet Tactical Doctrine in WW2
as they both mention Tank riders around 1944.
Also Vizh has a few articles on infantry and tank support.
Tank Attack in Wooded Terrain”
Translated and digested by the MILITARY REVIEW “from a Russian, article by
Major General A. Belogorsky in “Krasnaia Zvezda” (~. S.S.R.) 27 December 1946.
It would, therefore, seem that it is better to use uhecheloned tank forma-ons, but experience shows that in break-hrough operations against enemy posi-ons located in wooded terrain it is isadvantageous for the attacking tanks employ a line formation. On encounter-ng powerful antitank blocks and ambushes, tanks in line cannot always over-ome “them, because there is no continuityeffort which can be obtained from armation in depth. If the tanks succeedn slipping through the position, the
nfantry advancing behind the tanks iseld back by hostile fire, while the tanks say find themselves in the forest without ny infantry support.
The mission of our tanks and infantry. was to clear the forest of the enemy,advancing in a northerly direction, parallel to the Passarge River. With the as-sistance of artillery, the enemy waspushed off the main line of resistance,and the tanks, advancing through thefores’t with the infantry, took possessionof the road intersection northeast of theswamp. The scouts ,found that the enemy wasdefending all forest roads with the mainbody of his troops. The commander thenmoved his tanks along narrow lanes andover the swamp. By doing so, the tanks,self-propelled guns, and artillery of the enemy were bypassed and left on the road ikl the rear of the attacker. Fearing en-circlement, the Germans withdrew their tanks, leaving on the road only machinegtlns ‘and men armed with sub-nlachine guns, Against them we used a part of our tanks and self-propelled guns, as well as 82-mm mortars.
The following battle formation was used: Tank companies were divided into platoons. Each platoon moved in its assigned direction along a path or a lane. Leading tanks fired forward, while. the rest fired to the flanks. Each tank platoon was supported by a platoon of infantry which moved 100 to 200 meters ahead of the tank. Inasmuch as there was danger of an attack by $ank ‘destroyers in the forest, each machine was protected by five to eight sub-machine gunners. The sappers, advancing before the tanks and the infantry, were in close contact ~th their machines and protected them. by ill possible means, At times, the tanks were within ,battle formations of the infantry. Whenever necessary, the infantry approached the tanks very closely and, personally or through the sub-ma-chine gunners, pointed out targets for the tanks. Self-propelled guns advanced, in the main, along roads, edges of the forest, and through its openings. The most stub-born resistance was encountered to the north of the swamp. The Germans coun-terattacked with tanks and assault guns They moved, however, only along main roads and in columns, while our tanks, ~ssisted by sappers, successfully advanced through” the lanes. Later,’ the scouts found a weak link in the defensive position’ of the enemy. The commander committed a group of tanks and his reserve. Concealing themselves behind trees, th:y made a wide envelop- ment and plugged all the exits from the forest which might be used by the hostile tanks.’ This maneuver decided the fate of the battle. Threatened by complete encircle- ment in the forest, the enemy began a hurried withdrawal to the eastern bank of the Passarge River. As a result, the Germans left their strong positions at the road intersections west of the river with- out offering resistance. They had not expected that our tanks would encircle their entire group (see sketch ).
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As discussed in another thread the best way 'game-wise' to model this Russian charge is to use the order "Shoot and Scoot". With a T34 on hard dry ground you need bounds of 100m.
The effective is that your tanks goes 'Fast' forward, stops, fires and then Fast forward again. They seem to get a morale boost this way and there is less tank cower. Each move you will cover about 200m ish but less of wet ground, rough, etc.
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Just arrived in the post yesterday. Covers the critical battles in the Ukraine and southern USSR in the months following Kursk in 1943 and 44. Battles of the Dneipr Vend, Korsun Pocket, Fall of Kiev, Hube's Great Escape - lots of good material there.
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The Repository is reached from the www.battlefront.com front page see: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314
You also need the Scenario Depot www.the-scenario-depot.com look under my name for the Sorted Scenario Packs, this will give you about 4000 scenarios and DAF Scenario listing so that you can find the ones you want.
Then you need to improve the look of your game with a few mods so go to Green As Jades mod site http://cmmods.greenasjade.net/ and get yourself a few mods.
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I'd love to read some well written AARs. I've just been slaughtered by the AI on the Ford Crossing scenario (me playing Axis) and could use some tips!
Are there any other AARs besides the ones posted by this gent?
Many thanks
Ravs
What specifically is the problem and do you want to learn to play Axis or Allied?
I have got an article written Fionn called "Tanks Movement to Contact" that I could email you if that is what you are looking for. It is no longer available from download as many of the CM sites are closing down, like cmmods and combatmissionHQ
There is also a good primer here: http://www.tripprobbins.com/gaming/CM/index.htm
If you want to learn the Soviet side, then go to www.blowtorchscenarios.com and get JasonCs Russian Training series and download my Russian Way of War from the Repository for an overview.
See also the three Tank problems -these are taken from Panzer Tactics which is always a good read.
The best advice I was given was play "real tactics" and act as if it was your own life you were risking.
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They die very easily, so you have to bring them up behind your infantry. They travel slowly and tire easily so use short moves and hide at the end of each one. Sneak if possible but only over short distances. Range is about 30m so you often have some difficulty getting into range but they will wipe out a squad if you can get there. Can be used against tanks as a sort of TH
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Colonel
Are you use you have your horizon set on unlimited, If it is set on 1000m that might be the problem
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Again this scenario is in the Sorted Scenario Pack no author name, folder Normandy 44
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So that you do not get into a complete muddle, the best thing is to back up your current scenario folder. Extract all your scenario packs into a folder in my documents and then copy and paste what you want over into the scenario folder in the guts of the game. If you fill it up with 1400 scenarios you will never find anything. Regard it as a temporary holding place while the main library sits safely elsewhere.
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If you want to find any scenarios then look in the Respository or at the Scenario Depot for Der Alte Fritz - Scenario Listings.
There are a CMAK scenario called Inferno (no author listed) listed and another called Inferno for CMBB.
All these scenarios are available at the Scenario Depot - look for the Sorted Scenario Packs (1550 CMBB and 950 CMAK scenarios) under Der Alte Fritz CMAK Italy and France 43-44 and CMBB 14 Summer 44
So what is new and what is worth buying?
in Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin
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What has happened to the Panzer Commander series, it seems to have gone very quiet recently?