Dietrich

According to Len Deighton (in his book Blood, Tears, And Folly), just days after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, Stalin signed an order mobilizing 15 million men. By contrast, the entire German invading force was 3.5 million. Partly true, partly not. Soviet equipment, tactics, and industrial capability did improve over the course of the war. Thanks to a two-front (some would say three-front) war by 1944, Germany's manpower capacity suffered steady attrition. What's remarkable is the despite being steamrollered by the Soviets in the east and barely managing to hold back the Allies in the west (only 1/8 of the Wehrmacht was ever deployed against the Western Allies from D-Day on) and being bombed day and night (literally), Germany was producing more guns, tanks, ammo, etc., later in the war. (This was largely because German war manufacturing was not up to full speed until c.1942.) Obviously, the USSR had much more industrial capability than Germany. But the United States had much more industrial capability than the USSR -- about 40% of the world's total manufacturing capability.

Point blank is bayonet range. The British have used bayonets in combat as recently as 2004 in Iraq. If I had my hands on the book I read this account in, I could give more specifics, but.... a unit of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was ambushed by insurgents. The British ran out of ammo, then charged with bayonets the trenches which the insurgents were firing from. According to one of the British soldiers in that instance, the insurgents generally looked shocked; he figured they assumed the British would just keep firing at them from their own trenches. Ambushing from beyond grenade range is wise, I suppose. Ambushing within grenade range seems to me more like an SOF sort of thing -- each guy hurls a grenade then lets loose a burst or two from his carbine, and then they all disappear into the landscape.

The comments made by James Crowley and Lethaface on page 27 of the now-closed thread in question (http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86106&page=26) reminded me of my experiences playing the demo of Firefight, which is apparently based on/inspired by the Close Combat games. One thing I noticed about Firefight was that it was impossible to issue orders to out-of-contact units -- for example, if a squad was out of contact with the platoon HQ, you had to move the HQ unit to within range of the squad to be able to give it orders. To put this 'no commands to out-of-contact units' idea in CMSF terms: You have an MG team in overwatch position on a crest with the rest of the platoon moving to contact a couple hundred meters down the slope. Suddenly the lead squad spots enemy units moving amongst the houses 200m ahead and reports such (by radio or shouts) to the platoon HQ following. Wanting to recon by fire on other houses, you move the camera to the MG team's position and click on it... and there's no radio icon in the C2 box. Since the MG team is out of C2 (at that time, at least; it could get its radio working again), it can't receive orders from HQ, so no area-fire. Just an idea, of course. Some would say that being unable to issue commands to out-of-contact units would eggregiously hinder Red, especially Uncons, since they have no radios, but that would just mean you can't have your units positioned unrealistically far from one another. I think it would make sense for a unit which has only radio/RPDA contact to not necessarily fire right where it's ordered to.

Plenty of times I have seen an Abrams take a hit which renders it "Destroyed", upon which the crew bails out, even though its tracks and engine are fine and none of the crew WIA or KIA -- it's "destroyed" even though, according to the damage tab, nothing critical has a red X. If a tank is rendered combat-ineffective but is still mobile, why would the crew bail out? Wouldn't they first try to reverse out of danger? It seems something odd for the TacAI to do, especially compared to instances when it acts wisely, such as when a TOW vehicle reverses out of LOS as soon as the tubes are empty and it has to reload.

So long as the NATO module includes the MG3, I'll be happy. (I'd say the same for the Leopard 2, but I suppose it's as much of a given that that tank will be included as well.) It'll do my heart good to dish out heaping helpings of 1200-rounds-a-minute death to murderous Taliban. :cool: Now for the quasi-off-topic: I am (to paraphrase Eddie Izzard) "very positive on the French, but they can be, well, French at times." Alizée is tres belle.

*** SPOILERS! *** Now that I have finally played "Battle for Objective Pooh" through, I can report: I attacked up the center, between the highway and the buildings at Objective Eeyore. Never have my forces fired so much 40mm in a single battle. I had as many as five AAVs simultaneously area-firing their AGLs at different buildings. It seemed that no amount of small-arms fire was able to defeat or even just discourage any given Syrian infantry unit. I had to pound with AGLs every building from which I had received enemy fire. I even levelled several buildings with a couple minutes of Mk 19 area fire from two or three AAVs at a time. I lost two Abrams and most of a sniper squad to the same ATGM. A third Abrams actually got its cannon damaged -- the first time that's happened to any tank of mine in CMSF. (It seems the only way to not lose at least one Abrams to ATGMs is to decisively bombard the places where I know ATGMs are set up.) Only lost one AAV, though, somewhat surprisingly. An F/A-18 or two to drop JDAMs on key spots (ATGM sites) would be nice. Too bad the helos usually have only enough missles for the T-62s and BMPs (though typically I see one or two T-62s lurking behind buildings when I review the map after the battle). It is nice, though, to have a unit which has full green plus-sign contact with the air assets. Is it just me, or are Syrians' rifle grenades more deadly than the Blue 40mm? Now I cringe whenever I hear the sound of a rifle grenade exploding without the sound of such being fired from an M203 or M32. Oh, and by the way: All (or nearly all) of the Red forces on the map are Crack. No wonder it seems like you have to blow them away where they stand. In most other battles, the enemy fires, your forces fire back, and the enemy often cowers or buggers off. In "Pooh", though, they really stand and fight.

*** POTENTIAL SPOILER(S)! *** In playing "Debouch to Disaster" (from USMC Semper Fi, Syria! campaign), I had an HQ team spotting from the crest of a hill and an LAV positioned hull-down about 20m to the team's right. The HQ team had spotted a BMP, whereas the LAV, though it had LOS to the area where the BMP was, had not spotted the BMP itself. I figured the CO would send one of his immediate subordinates (or even his XO) over to the LAV to climb onto the turret and tell the LAV's commander, "Hey, there's a BMP right by the east wall of the northern building of that farm down there -- the captain figures if you fire a couple dozen shells into the little courtyard there, you're bound to hit it", so I had the LAV area-fire on that spot for several seconds and sure enough, the HQ team's spotting confirmed that the LAV knocked it out. *shrug* *** END SPOILER(S) *** When almost every unit has a radio, I don't think it's gamey for a well-positioned but lightly armed unit (like a sniper team) to call something with not-so-good LOS but heavier weaponry, along the lines of*: Sniper: "Kilo One-One, this is Super Four-Two; come in, over." LAV: "Super Four-Two, this is Kilo One-One; I read you." Sniper: "Spotted an RPG team on the upper floor of the building at your eleven o'clock." LAV: "[long pause] The two-story building with the balcony and three windows on the upper floor?" Sniper: "Affirmative. [pause] Recommend you recon by fire; that'll probably send 'em packing." LAV: "Acknowledged, Super Four-Two...." Sometimes, though, the C2 indicator shows that a given unit (this is especially true of dismounts) does not have radio contact with friendly units; in such a case, telling a friendly unit to fire on an area where the out-of-contact unit had spotted an enemy unit would not be realistic. * I have little idea how BLUFOR units communicate with each other via radio; I can only assume that movies like Black Hawk Down are at least basically accurate in that regard.

Most of the instances I've read regarding tactical battles for bridges were where the attacking force seized the bridge before the defenders blew it up -- c.f. the Germans' capturing of the bridges on the Bug river on July 22, 1941.

As far as CMSF is concerned, there's no real tactical difference between an F15E Strike Eagle and an F16C Block 50/52 -- both are quite capable (to cite a specific tactical example) of dropping a 2000 lb bomb squarely onto a bunker day or night. As far as why neither fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters are not visible in-game: even to model helicopters would require an unwieldy amount of new code, and it could easily turn into a can-of-worms kind of thing in terms of not looking good enough, not being aerodynamically accurate, etc.

But what if a movie about GIs in Normandy were to show them most of them using M1903 Springfields instead of M1 Garands? That might seem like too obvious a gaffe to be possible, but that's not too far off from what was done in the end battle of Saving Private Ryan: in a number of shots you can see either an MG34 or an MG42 carried by the German troops in that scene, but at no point in that entire battle does any of them ever fire. There's even one shot (perhaps more) of that 20mm FlaK gun being manhandled while another German soldier puts an MG42 into position. Not only is it a glaring omission for the Germans not to be employing their LMGs (which in reality formed the lynchpin of their squad-level tactics), it's even more ludicrous in the context of them bothering to use a 20mm FlaK gun as if it were an über-caliber LMG on a wheeled carriage. But then again, the Rangers and Airborne troops didn't bother to use the bazooka(s) they had (you can see one resting against an exterior wall in at least one shot).

The M36 wasn't deployed to the ETO until September 1944. The M10 and M18 were somewhat limited in their effectiveness against Panthers and Tigers because of the inconsistent performance of the 76mm gun they were armed with. As often as not, the M10 was used more in the role of infantry support (not unlike the German StuG) than in the tank-destroyer role it was designed for.

Not to be a rank grog, but since we're getting so specific... To say that the typical Gruppenführer was an NCO is a tad misleading. The Heer had in effect four ranks of private: (in ascending order) Schütze/Grenadier, Oberschütze/Obergrenadier, Gefreiter, and Obergefreiter. The next rank up from Obergefreiter was Unteroffizer -- the typical Gruppenführer rank (though men of rank as low as Schütze could be found leading squads according to circumstance) -- but this was equivalent to corporal; the following ranks were Unterfeldwebel and Feldwebel. The Germans only considered men of Feldwebel rank and up (to Hauptfeldwebel) to be NCOs; men below that rank were private soldiers. All the same, thanks for the input, Cid250.

My impression has long been that no Hollywood (or similar) movie will ever be not at least a little bit propagandistic (and thus somewhat unhistorical), because in Hollywood there's always an axe to grind -- if a movie doesn't have an axe to grind, no one will fund it, and so it won't see the light of day. In light of that, it's no surprise that, just to name one example, in Saving Private Ryan there happened to be an awoved Jewish GI and he happened to be knifed to death by a Waffen-SS soldier. In watching Flags Of Our Fathers, the hair on the back of my neck stood up during those long-distance shots of bombers making their runs on Mount Suribachi because instead of just showing the bombers flying overhead and then a line of fire-and-smoke explosions on the ground, you could actually see the bombs pouring from the planes. When a tank fires its cannon in a movie, why is it that they almost never make the barrel recoil as if the cannon actually fired but instead just put a flashpot (non-technical term) in the barrel? And you rarely (if ever) see tanks at anything beyond effectively point-blank range to the infantry (oftentimes because the infantry are the main characters).

I submit: The Tiger in the screenshot looks like it's fitted with transport tracks because (I'm guessing) the screenshot was taken in "wide" mode (as opposed to "x1.0" like in CMSF), so the sense of depth seems skewed. Since the impression I'm getting is that CM:Normandy will be more or less US Army versus Heer, I'll add my $0.0002 (adjusted for inflation ) -- even if historically there were no Tigers (or Panthers) facing the US forces in Normandy and were thus noted included in CM:Normandy, there would still be German armor (i.e. Pz IVJ) that could give any half a dozen Shermans a run for their money; said armor just wouldn't necessarily be able to face half a dozen Shermans at a time and run little risk of getting knocked out in the process.

Insight into certain aspects of Allied tactics (and what the Germans thought about them) can be gleaned from the following links: http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/battalion-commander/index.html http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/firepower/index.html http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/tankinfteam/index.html http://www.dererstezug.com/WhatTheGermansThought.htm As far as (to use a specific example) having a German squad go prone upon coming under fire and limiting their firing to their MG34/42 unless confronted by a fairly close-range threat, AFAIK it would be a matter more of coding than of different animations, since the animations would not need be any different than those already available.

The pic above well illustrates how the German infantryman was trained to hold his rifle in his right hand (see http://www.dererstezug.com/HandletheRifle.htm for more elucidation), whereas the US Army infantryman was trained to hold his rifle in both hands. I think the "individual soldiers low-running with their rifles in their off-hand" phenomenon would be more common among American infantrymen. Speaking of animations, relative to this statement (quoted from the above-linked article)... ...I would like to see the German infantry in CMx2-WW2 act accordingly: upon coming under fire, they go prone (rather than tending to come to a halt standing and return fire reflexively, as infantry do in CMSF).

In plotting movement orders for your troops (this works for vehicles as well), move the cursor over the terrain and note if/when it changes from green to blue. A blue movement-order cursor indicates impassable terrain. Hope this helps.

Not only are tanks loud, they're loud enough that (especially when buttoned up) it's almost impossible to hear anything quieter than nearby gunfire or the explosion of HE shells. That's part of why (in WW2, at least) savvy tank commanders went unbuttoned as much as possible, the better to spot targets annd to aurally detect threats both near and far. According to Franz Kurowski, on one occasion the German tank commander Hans Bölter climbed onto a Tiger to warn the crew of Russian tanks lurking nearby, and even though he shouted at the top of his lungs, the crew could only hear him enough to think he was a Russian tank-hunter. Ironically, Bölter heard one of the Tiger's crew shout: "Russian infantry on our tank!"

"That guy" = Kurt Suleski, the guy with the MG42? Did you watch the entire video, so as to notice that first he demonstrated the wrong way to fire the MG42 from the hip? *shrug* Besides, I never said it was a perfect demonstration of Sturmfeuer.

In the MG3 clip Vark provided, the machine-gunner seems a bit lackadaisical in his stance. For a demonstration of Sturmfeuer with an actual MG42 by the reenactor Kurt Suleski, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp0FbdrsIGM. Sure, the MG42 (like the MG3) has an attached bipod, but sometimes the enemy is so close that there's no time to plant the bipod on something or there's nothing to plan it on. I too have read that in several sources. I've also seen close-up video of a Lee-Enfield being fired ( ) and also of a Kar 98k ( ). It looks to me like the Lee-Enfield's bolt is rather easier to work than the Kar 98k's, which would substantiate the reports of working the bolt with just thumb and forefinger.

I've read about that particular instance in a few different sources. That battle was in November or December 2001, IIRC. ODA 555, CCT (Combat Controller Team) inclusive, was spotting for a B-52 that was just beginning its bomb run on the Taliban positions (which included a couple dug-in tanks), when one of Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum's commanders misunderstood a message over the radio and ordered his force to charge. The B-52's bomb (it was huge, definitely larger than 2000#, but I forget the exact size) struck the Taliban positions just before the Afghan cavalry (as they rode charging onward, they were firing their AKs rested on their left arms, which were holding the reins) got within the blast radius, so that the charge swept over the Taliban before they had a chance to regain their senses. It could have just as easily happened that the Afghan militia charge arrived before the bomb, and the fallout from the resultant friendly-fire losses might have crippled the USSOC/Northern Alliance effort. So no doubt ODA 555 guys wiped the sweat from their brows and breathed a sigh of relief afterward.

In one sense, I prefer getting a squad close enough to unleash a barrage of handgrenades (not least because that seems more effective than point-blank full-auto bursts). On the other hand, getting up close and personal means the enemy can stick it to you all the better. At the sort of range M240s are suited to (200+ meters), you can inflict casualties on the enemy and degrade his morale without exposing your own troops to as much threat. Secondbrooks, you could try putting your MG teams in more or less the same place to concentrate their firepower on a given target or area. (Just a suggestion, of course.)

Yes, that I understand. The loadout looks like a good amount of firepower -- each fire team looks roughly equivalent to a Marine fire team (minus the AGL, obviously), but with what seems to me to be about 40-50% more full-auto-type firepower.

I suppose that troops would believe there's no reason to improve tactics or practice warfighting if, no matter how well or badly they fight, when they die they'll still go to something resembling heaven and be surrounded by virgins, or whatever ideology they actually believe.* * I claim no actual understanding of Muslim beliefs or knowledge of whether Syrians or Iranians are even generally Muslim.

Section = two four-man fire teams? 1x SA80, 1x SA80+UGL, 1x LSW, & 1x LMG per fire team? Much greater range than the M4 while only slightly larger overall -- sounds good to me.