Dietrich

JasonC, Thank you for the recommendations. I had not heard before about Jason Mark, nor Zetterling or Roman. Heinrich 505, Do An Infantryman in Stalingrad or Island of Fire have anything to do with Joachim Stemper (Stempel?), who I believe was a company commander in a certain Panzergrenadier regiment there? Tero, I have In Deadly Combat and found it quite interesting, especially since it's from the perspective of a man who was both a Pak gunner and later a rifle company commander. On a side note, has anyone ever browsed the customer reviews of German soldier memoir books on Amazon? Most of the reviews provide rather amusing reading.

Note to self: 1. Read book(s) by Glantz. (I found this article by Glantz quite instructive.) 2. Ask JasonC about who I should read for detailed small-unit German infantry combat accounts other than Carell.

A two-man AT team can carry three Javelin missiles? My every attempt to get a Javelin team (or an AT team detached from a regular infantry squad) to carry more than two Javelin missiles has been unsuccessful. When I notice that a Javelin-equipped soldier/Marine is getting a lock on a vehicle that I don't want to use a Javelin to take out (such as a "mere" BMP-2), I order the entire team/squad to Hide, and the team/squad hides, but guy with the Javelin keeps on aiming until he either gets a lock-on and fires or the targeted vehicle becomes a "?", whichever comes first.

If a soldier or a Marine started shooting (if not actually killing) each and every non-combatant he encountered, how long would it be before his sergeant or the platoon commander or the company CO or somebody ordered him out of the combat zone or put him in custody or something?

It can if some Western reporter wants to give the story a punchline. In other words, why is it "Sin Chew" and not "Sin Chu"? Since when is "ew" a suitable substitute for the phoneme usually represented by "u", at least in the context of romanization?

If a P-47 strafed a Tiger and the pilot (or maybe another pilot in the same flight) saw flames coming from the rear of the Tiger, perhaps it was that the P-47's eight .50-cal MGs shredded the radiators and/or punctured the grille on top, either of which could (in my understanding) cause the engine to catch fire. In any case, fighter pilots -- whether they're dogfighting with 109s or strafing Tigers -- are apt to exaggerate things when it comes to kills scored and such.

Un-split squads often means bunching up. Bunching up makes for beaucoup casualities from lucky RPGs or on-target HE shells. Splitting squads means much less bunching up.

Pardon my mis-remembering -- my recollection of the USMC campaign's 1st scenario briefing was that the on-map scout units were SEALs. Perhaps the correction in the briefing from "SEALs" to "Scout Snipers from 1st Recon Plt, Co B, 2nd Recon Bn, BLT 2/6" was one of the changes to the campaign with v1.11(?) Reconnaissance Battalions provide division-level recon for the Ground Combat Element of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF). (A Marine Expeditionary Force, the largest type of MAGTF, comprises an entire Marine division along with a Marine Air Wing and a Marine Logistics Group.) Force Reconnaissance Companies provide deep recon for the Fleet Marine Force (FMF) and can be detached to and report to Marine division commanders, Command Elements of MAGTFs, etc. As far as I can tell, at least some of the confusion regarding "Force Recon" might stem from Call of Duty 4, in which one of the two main playable characters is stated to be a soldier in "1st Force Recon". But the game makes the USMC player's unit look much more like a full-blown MEU, what with the phalanxes of Abrams and ever-swarming Whiskey Cobras, and the missions performed by the player are much more like what would be assigned to an MEU (SOC) rather than a Force Recon Company.

I meant at all. I myself have never heard of such an instance. The most recent "active shooter" incident that I've heard about was the 2009 Pittsburgh police shootings, in which Richard Poplawski, wearing some sort of bulletproof vest and armed with an AK-type rifle, killed two policemen who arrived at his mother's home in response to a 911 call from the mother and then killed a third policemen as he tried to aid the first two. Similar though this may sound to the incident in Oakland last month (which also involved an AK-type weapon and resulting in the killing of four policemen), unlike Lovelle Mixon, Poplawski was not shot dead by police because when he actually got hit by police personnel -- no news report I've been able to find is anything but vague on the circumstances and extent of Poplawski's wound(s) -- he surrendered. While in police custody he stated that he had wished he had killed more cops and that he surrendered so as to be able to write a book in prison. (He's an avowed anti-Semitic white supremacist, and he has a stylized Nazi eagle tattoo on his upper chest which is partially visible in his mugshot.) True, not infrequently (in the US, anyway) are active shooters shot dead by police -- if only because they, unlike Poplawski, do not surrender -- the reason why it's so rare for an armed citizen to stop an active shooter is, as far as I can tell, the same reason why police take aim at an active shooter and don't necessarily just shoot him till he falls down dead. (By way of contrast with the two incidents above, during the highly publicized North Hollywood shootout, in which both of the active shooters had full-auto-capable assault rifles and were wearing augmented bulletproof vests that were impervious to the 9mm pistols and 12-gauge shotguns wielded by the police personnel who confronted them at first, neither of the shooters were shot dead by police -- both were wounded; one killed himself with his pistol after being hit 11 times, and the other surrendered after being hit 29 times.) In short, even when facing a heavily armed and evidently amoral person who has killed unarmed bystanders and is continuing to do so, the typical person hesitates to take aim and shoot to kill, evidently because the fear of becoming guilty of killing someone is greater than the fear of allowing others to be murdered.

I too like this idea. The only obvious problem I foresee with this is that the loading progress bar would obscure (at least partially) whatever image the scenario designer had included as the background, thus limiting its usefulness somewhat.

Would you agree that one's tactics are shaped by the forces under one's command? If yes, then I think it's reasonable to reckon that you will find that your tactics will be shaped by the composition of the USMC forces available to you. An Army rifle squad has 9 men, two of which have M249 SAWs. A Marine rifle squad has much more firepower than it's Army counterpart -- it has 13 men, three of which have M249s, and the fireteam leaders each have one M32 six-shot grenade launcher; and the squad carries three times the AT weaponry of an Army squad. It's likely you'll find that a Marine rifle squad can handle the full range of challenges. Between the "Semper Fi, Syria!" campaign and the bundled stand-alone missions, you will encounter the gamut of mission types, from cautious recon probes to hold-the-line defending scenarios to all-out combined-arms urban assaults with tanks and helos. In my experience, the USMC campaign is better designed and more varied than the stock CMSF campaign. Opposite the module's USMC forces are the Syrian Airborne forces. The Syrian Airborne troops themselves are perhaps the toughest conventional opponents you will face (as Blue), and their BMP-3 is the most heavily armed and dangerous APC/IFV in the Syrian arsenal. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sure, I'm fond of Strykers and Bradleys and regular ol' Army grunts, but those leathernecks and their weaponry have definitely earned my respect. And they have M1s too.

Indeed, bravo, Moon.

I find that even a .50-cal Stryker can put the hurt on a BMP-1 or -2 out to medium range. (I can't recall having yet played a scenario with Strykers versus BMP-3s.) Sure, the older BMPs have guns which can more definitively put the hurt on a Stryker than vice versa, but I find that my Strykers usually spot the BMPs first and are duly prompt in riddling them with their Ma Deuces.

True, there's isn't much concrete info per se. These wartime "intelligence" briefs ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as well as compared to the info furnished by the 60-plus years of post-war correlative research. I suppose several or even many of the tactics described would reasonably be considered "outliers" (of which made has been made in other threads), things that did happen but not so often that one would be right to worry about them all that much. Did the US have access to Pz IVGs as early as late 1942? If yes, would they captured one themselves, or would they have been shipped one by the British (or perhaps even the Soviets)? I'd be more inclined to date the film at mid or late 1943. By then the US would have had several months of direct contact with German forces so as to have captured rifles, MGs, grenades, uniforms, trucks, and even a Pz IVG. But that's just my assessment.

What gets me about the Pooh mission is that in every attempt I suffer extensive-enough casualties (for example, I never lose fewer than one Abrams) that it puts in doubt my ability to have sufficient forces to complete the campaign. In other words, the more I try to preserve my forces, the harder it is to achieve the mission objectives.

Ah, I see. So my mind's-eye image of a hurrying Marine taking a tumble after receiving a non-penetrating 7.62mm round to his chest plate (I think there's a shot in Black Hawk Down with something like this) is more a matter of how relatively off-balance the Marine is at the moment he gets hit.

Were the LAV-25 to have mounted on its turret a TOW launcher like the M1046 HMMWV has on its roof, it would be dangerous, I think. Sure, the Bradley has two TOW launchers mounted on the side of its turret, but this dual TOW launcher is protected by an armored casing, lessening its vulnerability to MG (remember Soviet-bloc MG calibers go as high as 14.5mm) and even rifle fire. I suppose that were an LAV-25 with an M1046-type TOW launcher mounted on the side of its roof were to come under heavy MG fire, the TOW tube might get punctured and the missile might thus explode. Besides, the LAV-25's 25mm cannon can put the hurt on even an MBT, unless it encounters said MBT in the classic scenario of face on at more than 2000m. Even Mavericks and Hellfires?

A simple reply would be to point out that gruesomely horrific things have been done to people since time immemorial, long before there were any media (in the traditional sense of the word). That said, the ancient Assyrians created bas-relief wall carvings depicting how the horrendous things they were infamous for doing to slaves and prisoners of war. One thing that struck me as ironic: The news report's tag line said that the 17-year-old's murder was (italics mine) "based on a scene from a spoof horror film". Have any of y'all ever heard of a would-be gruesome killing getting stopped by some daring citizen? Has anyone ever heard of an "active shooter" incident being brought to some sort of end by an armed citizen?

Thanks for the recommendations. I've done a bit of looking into OFP2 and ArmA2 and read some on each game's forum, and the opinion I've formed is that the games, while similar, are different yet comparably well made, so I figure I'll end up getting both, since each has plenty to offer. Something obvious: In WW2, most infantrymen had bolt-action rifles of .30 caliber (British .303-inch, German 7.92mm, Soviet 7.62mm), whereas nowadays infantrymen have semi-auto rifles/carbines of .223 or .30+ caliber (5.56mm vis-a-vis 7.62mm). So the number of bullets flying around at any given moment in modern combat is rather greater than in WW2, but the bullets themselves are often smaller. On a given co-op map, once I was blown up (along with one other guy) by a friendly player who decided to randomly fire off an AT4 in a narrow underground corridor, and a couple games later I was felled by a burst of 5.56 when a different friendly player didn't bother to confirm I was an enemy as I hurried round a corner. He was probably one of those guys who have a million honor points already, so he didn't have to care if he riddled a teammate, since he could afford the ROE penalty. Thanks for the explanation. What sort(s) of rounds would knock a guy down without necessarily penetrating his ballistic plate? Or is it a given that if a round has enough KE to knock a guy down, it has plenty of KE to punch through his armor?

I'm interested. Vielen Dank / Merci beaucoup / Thanks much, Andreas.

Arcade.... Phooey. Speaking of lethality being severely reduced from realistic levels, would taking a 5.56mm round to the ballistic plate (i.e., a round that didn't penetrate) be likely to knock me down? Taking a non-lethal/non-wounding hit and being knocked down certainly isn't something I've seen in any FPS I've played. In all the FPS and tactical shooter games I've played, getting hit is a matter of either seeing the view jerk violently and flashing red-tinged or of getting knocked down dead. My fairly recent playing of CoD4 online multiplayer has seen "me" get killed many more times than I have dished it out. Playing America's Army 2 was, in some ways, even more frustrating, since "enemy" players were consistently able to both spot me and shoot/snipe me within half a minute of the game starting (and no respawns in that game hehe). I think that in an FPS or tactical shooter which aims to live up to its claims of realism, jumping ought to be disallowed. In the countless combat clips viewable on YouTube, for instance, how often do you see a Marine or a soldier jumping? With all the weight they're carrying (clothing, ammo, armor, etc.), isn't it enough that they still have the strength to heave themselves over low walls? That said, I still look forward to checking out Operation Flashpoint 2 and ArmA 2 for myself.

No. AFAIK, encouraging the men to use their personal weapons to fire at attacking aircraft was as much for the preservation of morale as for the chance of a lucky 30-cal round scoring a worthwhile hit. From what I heard, all the German MGs in the film looked like their ROF was correct (assuming it would be harder than it's worth to make the guns actually fire slower), but the sounds they dubbed over sounded more low-pitched than I've ever heard from an MG34 or 42, more like a heavier-caliber MG, perhaps even a 50-cal. If by "any tank" the narrator means a Panzer III or IV, rather than a Tiger or a Panther. (Though, as I understand it, the 57mm certainly could put the hurt on a Tiger's or a Panther's side armor from close-ish range.) The narrator's similar claims about the bazooka whitewashed over the bazooka's characteristic ineffectiveness against the armor of the Tiger and the Panther. A contemporaneous photo shows a bazooka-armed GI kneeling partially behind the cover of the corner of a building and taking aim at the front of a Panther. It's clearly a staged shot, since not only would the bazooka have little chance of penetrating the Panther's front armor, but the GI would be inviting fire from the Panther's bow MG. If the GI knew his stuff (and if it wasn't a staged photo) he would have waited until the Panther had cruised past and exposed its side. The film assumes not only that a non-sniper would climb up into a tree on the edge of a clearing but that the Pak's crew would not, upon taking their first casualty (or just upon realizing they were under fairly accurate aimed fire) promptly hunker down behind the gun's shield. Now, I don't claim to know the penetration effectiveness of 30-cal ball rounds against metal of the quality and thickness that the Pak 40's shield was made out of, but I do know (and I think this can be seen in the film) that the Pak 40's shield was actually two sheets of metal spaced about a certain small amount (I'm not sure of the exact measurements), which provided greater protection than a single sheet of metal as thick as the two put together. Also, the film assumes that one or two of the Pak's crew would not return fire with their Karabiner, once they realized the enemy aimed fire was coming from not that far away. Or even an MP40. Better would be (assuming the terrain was in any way favorable) to crawl within grenade range and flush out the MG team with a frag or three. I imagine that not a few GIs were unpleasantly surprised at how quickly an MG42's barrel could be changed. Assuming that the pauses between an MG42's bursts could vary from half a second to five or more seconds, a good MG42 team could swap out a fresh barrel in fewer seconds than they might pause between bursts. By the time some sergeant realizes "hey, they've stopped firing," the MG-Schütze-Eins has already slid the fresh barrel into place and is working the charging handle. Actually, someone did mention such a tactic, but not until the Dec. 1944 issue of Intelligence Bulletin:

Point taken, Herr Feldmarschall. Had I not forgotten to accord the prior posters to this thread the respect they deserve, I would have re-read the thread and then decided my assessment. Ok, then what about somewhere other than Fallujah? What would the consensus be about an FPS wherein the player is a SOF operator hunting HVTs in Afghanistan in 2001/2002? I still think FPS games and military "sims" still are well off the mark in terms of realism because no matter how much of a game takes place in a densely populated city from which the civilian populace has expressly not been evacuated, the player never encounters civilians in game. (I should say almost never, since, though I've never encoutered a civilian in any FPS or "tactical shooter" I've played, I admit I have played only a relative few such games.) Were an FPS or a "tactical shooter" to include civilians, this would be seen not as being in accord with tactical reality of modern war -- where the typical Blue soldier has to distinguish, even at extended ranges, between armed combatants and unarmed civilians -- but as an excuse for some Harris/Klebold wannabe to massacre pixelvolk. Cuz you just know some malicious-hearted 15-year-old boy would buy the game, discover that there are both enemy combatants and innocent civilians, and would then spend all his free time shooting digital victims; sooner or later his mom would find out, she would be horrified (and rightly so), she would report it to some authority, that authority would report it to some news agency, and before we knew it the game would be getting pilloried in Congress (or some subcommittee thereof), and in no time at all it would be banned and pulled from shelves. So yeah, I figure no modern-combat-related game is going to include civilian NPCs. Perhaps it's some unwritten/unspoken rule (which I have all along simply been uanware of) in the game development community that no game ought to include characters which the player would not be fully justified to shoot in real life. I took note of posted in the "kill radius" thread. About midway through the video, half a dozen Marines are on the roof of a house in Fallujah, and from the inside the house come several voices chanting in unison -- in spite of the "rockets" fired at the building (the actual weapon used is never on screen, so I don't know what it was; either an AT4 or an M72 or a SMAW, I reckon) and the several grenades thrown into it, there were still insurgents lurking inside. I took note that the narrator says: "These might be desperate cries, but it could be a sign the house is booby-trapped." Now, I know virtually nothing of Arabic, but even I know that understood the insurgents' chanting to be -- no surprise -- "Allāhu akbar" (which means "God is great"). In other words, the men therein were not saying "please don't shoot" or anything like that. Come to think of it, it's a bit surprising that they started loudly chanting "Allāhu akbar", when keeping silent would have been kept the Marines guessing. Then again, evidently many of the insurgents gathered in Fallujah to die fighting.

How 'bout a firm open-handed slap 'cross the face? Not to re-open vociferous debate, but don't y'all think Six Days in Fallujah was dropped as much because of the assumed extent of civilian-killing in the real life battle as because of the supposed degree of gut-wrenched realism the game was aiming for?