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ArgusEye

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Posts posted by ArgusEye

  1. The small mortars would have very little effect on dug-in troops if the bomb falls outside their hole. That much is true. As harassing fire they would be used on exposed men, and would be approximately similar to hand grenading them.

    I came across an interesting study made just after WWI, titled Some biological effects due to high explosives, written by a British captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who tries to tie in suppression effects with shell shock and blows up some animals to show that many suppression effects correlate with physiological damage due to blast. He makes a good case for a strong suppressive effect -"dazing" if you will- from the sharp blastwave rolling over the foxhole alone. This effect goes up significantly with caliber.

    Not all suppression is fear of splinters.

  2. So far I haven't found the Heer documents about the retirement of the 5 cm mortars, but there were research projects in 1945, trying to find some use for the warehouses full of 5 cm bombs that were not used by the front. There are some off-hand remarks in there. Conversion to anti-air weapons was considered the most promising use, but it was never executed.

    The 5cm's were retired by OKH after the front soldiers began to refuse to take them along, something rare in the German army of the time. These were the perennially underequipped guys who would take anything for more firepower. The complaint was that the 'Effect' (Auswirkung) of the bombs was less than if the mortar team were equipped with rifles.

    5cm's were designed for semi-trench situations, in which you wanted to grenade an enemy position, which was out of reach. The expensive aiming equipment was meant to give the best pinpoint precision you could get given the nature of the weapon, and to increase precision it had very little range. This made for a weapon that was unimpressive at rifle ranges, and useless beyond.

    To say that they dropped the 5cm to get more 8,1cm is a bit odd. The 5cm was literally left behind, not traded in. If desired, one could get all the usual 8,1cm and retain the 5cm. But only a few second rate outfits did so.

    If you read the American lessons learned documents, the 60mm mortar is not so much loved for its effectiveness as it is for the fact that the platoon can get one right up to the firing line, as opposed to the 81's which have to be called for.

  3. As far as I've found, CEP for the M2 is not available anywhere. It would appear that operator error tends to be far too great a factor to have any certainty of dispersion. As far as I've been able to piece together, the ellipse of equal probability should be larger than 20 meters range and 30 meters side to side in combat conditions, based on vague estimates from Korea.

    To atone for the vague statements above, here's a snippet from a US umpires booklet from 1944, wherein firepower (much as in CMx1) is listed from several weapons:

    6240990260_351a9ab1a6_z.jpg

    A 60mm mortar is pretty much equated to a light machine gun in fire effectiveness.

  4. 1. US tanks were not effective

    US tanks, as a rule, were effective. They mostly had to exploit -which they did fine- and break down infantry positions. They were used for roles which on the Eastern front would have been played by breakthrough tanks, which a medium tank is decidedly less suited for. The American tanks were therefore excellent medium tanks -possibly better than any competition-, but they were used for more roles than they were good at. This has undeservedly tarnished their reputation.

    2, US CAS was not effective against tanks.

    Any air support during the second world war was decidedly iffy in effectiveness. Lessons learned documents usually state that 'our' air support was mega-effective, whilst 'theirs' caused little material damage, but disproportionate morale disruption. The same goes for soft targets behind the front line. It was not so much the actual losses to aircraft that stopped day traffic, but the wracked nerves of the drivers who were continually ready to be suddenly attacked.

    3. US troops were subpar.

    Tricky. Both sides say that German troops were more resilient, more enterprising, and more sly, but neither side has anything to deride their fighting spirit or courage. This is not likely to be due to anything about the troops themselves, and I think it has more to do with the tactical doctrine. German small units were trained with auftragstaktik in mind, whereas American troops were more micromanaged.

    4. US machinguns were not very good.

    The US machineguns were by no means bad. They may have been oldfashioned and heavy, but they filled their role well. It can be said that they were behind the times in their application of machine gun tactics, but it seems to have worked well.

    5. The Garand was not very good.

    If it was not very good, then everything everyone else fielded was awful in the extreme. It was an easy to use, robust semi-auto rifle. There was nothing to dislike.

    6. US artillery was what won for the US

    This statement is so abstracted that it lost all meaning. American artillery did a great deal of the work, but it was not the key to American success. That was plentiful supply of men and materiel.

    7. Supply lines too long.

    With the amount of trucks, ships and men they had at their disposal, the logistic flow was plenty deep and wide. And that is what matters.

  5. I got this impression from a brief run with the demo, so my impression might not be representative.

    The machine guns, not just the heavies, seem to do well when used against troops taking cover. Since this is the most realistic situation, it dominates. The reason, however, that most machine gun fire falls on soldiers taking cover, is that a soldier not taking cover when under machine gun fire has a very short life expectancy. And that is not modeled as well.

    I could maneuver troops while they were under fire from multiple machine guns, and that should not be without taking big casualties. I mainly suffered morale damage, when sending a team across open ground not two hundred meters from a machine gun. That's silly.

  6. I realize I'm a month overdue in reacting to this thread, but there's too much in here goading me to bite.

    The M3 gun was a decent tank gun when it was taken into service. The ammunition, however, wasn't up to the task. It was fed old SAP ammo, which turned out to shatter on 30mm FHA in a number of cases. This was a known problem, according to the papers from the Cairo ballistic tests. The M61 was meant to replace the SAP with a more robust projectile. In tests this worked fine, but in the field the Germans turned out to shrug off hits which should have penetrated easily. This turned out to be due to the projectile shattering on the armour.

    The M72 was a more spartan design for a penetrator, sacrificing behind-armour effect to achieve greater robustness. It was meant as an interim round, until the M61 could be improved. (I'm unclear on whether this involved introducing a cap to the M61 or just improving on the one it had.)

    When Tobruk fell to the British, they obtained a large stock of German 75mm AP shells, which they modified to be fired from Grant/Lee tanks. When fired from different ranges at captured Pz III's, it was noted that the German projectiles penetrated from farther, and their explosion behind armour was 'catastrophic'.

    The 'new' M61 turned out to be much less prone to shattering, but I cannot find any reference which says that they actually started penetrating deeper.

    While it is therefore true that the ammunition for the Sherman improved with time, it is still a gun putting out only 1.3 MJ versus the KwK40's 2.1 MJ.

    On the other side: the Pz IV was not a battlefield heavyweight anymore when it faced the Sherman. Its chassis was arguably obsolescent by the time it got the KwK40, and there was hot strife in the OKW about turning all Pz IV chassis production into StuG IV's and JPz IV's. The reason the turreted Pz IV tank was produced at all after half 1943 was Guderians insistence upon it. His argument was that the StuGs could not fulfill the role of full tanks in armoured breakthroughs - which is true. In hindsight we can wonder if it wouldn't have been better. The StuGs were 'harder' against enemy fire than the turreted tanks, and the exploitations Guderian dreamt of hardly ever took shape after this point.

    While it is true that the Pz IV had 80mm of armour on its front, this was compromised by many perforations for hatches, ports, and view slits. It had a much thinner turret front (50mm over half the front area!) than this 80mm figure. Even then, it was almost balancing on its front roadwheels. The Pz IVH wasn't impervious to fire from the Sherman, and the full Wa Prüf report bears this out. By '44, the IV was none too popular with the fighting men due to its overloaded suspension, compromised armour, and tendency to bog.

    As to metallurgy of armour steel, I am tempted to write a great essay, but I doubt anyone would be interested in the nitty-gritty.

  7. If you liked that, here's some more information:

    On average, from '41 to '45, 55 supply trains would roll to the East each day. There would also be troop trains, PoW trains, evacuation/deportation trains, internal transport for redeployment, maintenance/coaling trains, armored train patrols, hospital trains, and regular commercial traffic! All of these trains would have to return as well, of course!

    All this together could mount quickly, and in the winter of '42-'43 the average number of total trains leaving the Reich for the front was 265 per day.

    A separate statistic: 84 partisan 'attacks' on the railways were recorded per day in '43, although a good number of these were placing mines or other stuff on the track. On some pieces of line, trains were not allowed to travel without escort. This would be an armored train, if it could be spared.

  8. OKH expected a Russian standard rail line to be converted into international standard gauge at a pace of 20km per day, when served by a full railway batallion. This could be quicker if the track wasn't mined, sabotaged or within artillery range of the enemy.

    On the other hand, some Russian rail lines turned out to have substandard ballasting, which meant that the track would either have to be completely replaced and built with new ballast, or would only support much lighter traffic.

    Even then, building a serviceable line could be achieved at spectacular rates. Stavka was reportedly taken by complete surprise when the Germans drove a standard rail line up to Smolensk at 10 km/day.

    This only held for the unfrozen months. Extension of the rail heads on frozen sleepers turned out to be almost impossible.

    Compare these figures with the effort required to transfer the cargo of (on average for the Germans) 55 freight trains per day to other trains (55 trains x 450 ton per train )- without the use of forklifts! Then figure in the delay of the cargo, breakage, vulnerability to air attack of the transfer station, etc. No fun at all.

    Switches, crossings etc. take more time, but you don't have so many of them. Plus, the Germans didn't like the Russian switches anyway and replaced them completely. Coaling stations also were no big effort to build in perspective with the rest of the effort.

    Larger problems occurred with German locomotives seizing up due to dust or cold, with a whole new design (42 Ost) being needed for reliable service. Another big problem was that the German locomotives were hungry for high-grade coal, which was not locally available. The stopgap measure was to drench Ukrainian coal in fuel oil.

  9. Around the road (which is where most of the action was) the area is quite ridiculously flat. Featureless, almost. No dunes, just flat ground. When you go 10-40 km north, there is some sloping and some more rocky terrain. Then near the coast, there is a small strip of quite steep mountainous terrain where the plateau ends - sometimes into the sea.

    Dunes only come into it if you go into the Reg Sahara, and elevation only becomes noticeable when quite a bit off-road. Near the road, everything is best modeled with a LARGE map, with gentle curves, dry and dusty, with one long straight road going from one end to the other, and flat with a few dimples of one level. Completely open ground for most of the surface. Sprinkle very sparsely with brush tiles, and serve.

    Tank country. Bring long range guns.

  10. I don't think I will. In my experience, if twenty people will express interest, twelve might be up for it, six will actually show up, of which three will flake out, and one will get a heart attack or divorce, leaving you with two players, if lucky. There is not much gusto here, so I think I should just abandon it.

    Already a problem has cropped up, I had no trouble finding operation level players in my personal circle, but only one had CM, and only one other was willing to get it. They're doing all the tactical stuff together, and most of that is terribly lopsided and looks rather pointless when taken out of context. The example battle I mentioned above was already viewed as boring on the forum, so I think I've just been barking up the wrong tree by trying to get people from here.

  11. I've run layered games like this before, albeit not with CM as tactical resolution. The only trick is to know your stuff and keep control, then it isn't too hard. I don't see a problem there.

    Where I do see a problem, is that there just doesn't seem to be too much enthusiasm. I may have misjudged how this part of the wargames world operates. I'm more of the simming side of things, but this forum seems to be more gaming oriented. It's a matter of taste.

  12. It would seem the 76AA was not used by the Soviets as AT on anything like a large scale. I'm sure it happened though, on occasion.

    The things that hamper the AT gun against heavy armour are a few well known ones:

    - Borg spotting. A tank that just got used as a bell is usually not great at spotting anything, but when one spotter sights any target, all units have pinpoint knowledge of its position. Emplaced AT guns were historically quite hard to spot, despite their muzzle flash and smoke - and virtually invisible if not firing.

    - The ammo load of AT guns is on the high side for guns that can be moved around by their crew, but rather low for well-emplaced guns. I understand the compromise, but the effect is that emplaced AT guns have a lot more to worry about ammo-wise than their real life counterparts.

    - Kneading armour by sending shot after shot into the same area of plate is not modeled. This was a very well known technique, and the Soviets had elevated it to doctrine. The dearth of this aspect makes quite a difference in these circumstances. Especially Soviet AT gun vs. Kitty is affected.

    - Targeting running gear at short range, which was done by many guns that couldn't penetrate the body, is not modeled. Even at short range the gun only targets the whole tank. This fits quite well with the dismal accuracy of all guns in the game.

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