MengJiao
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Posts posted by MengJiao
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Hey guys, newbie here... I was just wondering if you could recommend a book about the normandy campaign. I'm looking for some detailed reading with maps and photos to follow the action better.
Thanks in advance!
You can get the US official history (and or Blumenson):
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Breakout/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Blumenson
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/martin-blumenson-my-remembrance-of-a-friend.htm
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I would only add to this that just before you strike with your tanks try to get the target tank to button up. Use that infantry that you used to find the tank in the first place to scare the tank commander into closing up. That way the target tank has less ability to spot and is distracted by another target - your infantry that shot at him. 30s latter your tanks come over the ridge, behind the trees or whatever with your tank commanders open and spotting. That will help with the odds of who see's who first and who get first shot.
Anything that makes the target button up is a pretty good idea: mortar fire, artillery, mgs, snipers, small arms are all good for that.
I once cleared a village full of Panthers with an M10 and a 57mm mostly by using infantry to keep the Panthers buttoned up and spotted.
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Oh, Oh, Michael Wittmann must be trembling in his boots ! But then he has no idea about the 17pdr Sherman. Surprise !
He should have been more worried about 6pdrs which is what knocked out his Tiger at Villers-Bocage.
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March is my bet.
Sounds about right when you think of all the new stuff. Achilles, 3-inch mortars! Sextons. various armored cars. Belgians with long knives in the Household Cavalry.
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IMO that poster was a sock-puppet for someone else as the poster registered to post in that thread - and no other - and c'mon, like he didn't know that his response would get him banned?
I think Elron Hubub was that rarest and most wonderous of creatures: an actual troll. Not a sockpuppet at all. I was hoping to keep him for a bit. What I found interesting was that he seemed only to read various internet sources about the game and attempted to pass such things off as his own observations. So essentially he plagarized his complaints and had no actual interest in the games or anything else, but only in his trolling. I wondered why he pretended to have played the demo since nothing he said had anything to do with the demo.
It's sad, but actual trolls are very hard to keep in captivity, they have to be off trolling and trolling all the time.
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The "missed opportunity" that truly breaks my heart is that France did not take action when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936. At that time Germany's military strength was relatively negligible and could have easily been brushed aside. I have read that that is in fact what the German generals expected and they were prepared to arrest Hitler, put him on trial, and shoot him. But he won his gamble and the army and the rest of the country was willing to go along with him as long as he was on a winning streak.
There are several lessons to be drawn from that, but I fear the most important one, namely that a seeming winner may in fact be a disaster waiting to happen, has not been attended as well as it deserves.
Michael
The French in 1936 are indeed hard to understand. Reading Paxton's French Peasant Fascism didn't help me much.
Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic at least gives a feel for how messed up France was in the 1930s.
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1. Frankly speaking 50 times is hard to believe (it would have made the toll 12.5 million or 37.5 million if count in fire bombing) but I read Downfall first before seriously arguing for or against.
2. I think "occupied by Russians" is very important in the context of how Truman and Churchill might think at that point of time. Seems like even if they didn't believe in Russians eating people alive their thinking did not exactly go that far from the idea. Like Vietnam - nobody thought of Vietnamese peasants - imaginary Domino Effect was more important than their lives. Total war at all costs.
Counting starvation for another year, attack from all sides and maybe some more fighting in China plus the US estimate (based on Okinawa) of 1 million US casualties, 12.5 million is probably a good ball-park guess.
But at the time, blocking the Russians and avoiding 1 million US casualties seemed like a good enough idea.
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If you haven't already read it, I strongly recommend Downfall by Richard B. Frank. He goes over all of this in some detail. To tell the truth, I was surprised by some of the information he was able to glean by looking at primary Japanese documents. They were more prepared to fight, and fight effectively, than I had previously believed.
Michael
Mr Emrys is entirely correct. Downfall does show that dropping nukes probably saved at least 50 times more people than it killed as well as saving Japan from being partly occupied by the Russians.
The crucial element for Japan was timing. They were busy surrendering, but is was way too slow especially with the Russians getting ready to hit the relatively undefended northern Islands.
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hope you are right, my testes today and yesterday are all with 1.01 patch
I'm always a little cranky when I patch my testes too.
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They hadn't meant Pearl Harbor to be a "sneak" attack but it was perceived as such by the US and there would be no thought of settlement.
Yet the Japanese got a much better deal than the Germans. As you point out even the nukes were just as much to keep the Russians out as to take over an relatively well-populated Japan. so there was a de facto settlement or a series of de facto settlements with the Japanese.
Even after the series of surrenders in September (and each regional Japanese command seems to have surrendered under a separate local protocol), Japanese forces were still in control of large parts of China, Indochina, and the DEI.
And of course, the Japanese got to keep their Emperor.
So not a big win for the Little Empire, but not a complete and utter unmitigated crushing such as the Germans got.
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Great a little bit of contested China. Kicked out of Burma, about to be totally beaten by the Soviets, no longer in the Philippines. In addition no navy and the entire country open to B29 strikes. Only islands controlled those we didn't care about.
Japan was starving, no oil was getting in, no coal from Manchuris. They were handing out bamboo sticks to the population to kill the invaders.
US subs, surface ships and aircraft sunk 2,534 ships of 8,897,393 tons. They had no merchant marine. Subs got 1178 ships of slightly over 5 million tons and another 214 naval craft of 578,000 tons.
Nukes were used to avoid US casualties and Japanese casualties and wind up the war. The point here is we could've done nothing but blockaded Japan in 1945 and waited for them to beg for peace after millions died of starvation. In addition we wanted our few still alive POW's back that hadn't been murdered already.
The Japanese were still fighting in the Phillipines and controled most of China, all of Indochina, most of the DEI. US casualties were going up steadily as the battles got closer to Japan. Given how little they had, they did a lot better than the Germans. And in the end they faced all of the allied forces alone.
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About the only things of any value that the Japanese still held at the end of the war, were Vast tracts of China, Korea, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, and as previously noted they received little use of those due to the loss of so much of their merchant marine.
Michael
And Singapore. I don't think the Germans held "vast tracts" of anything when they surrendered. And it didn't take nukes to knock out the Germans.
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Yes I was being generous it really wasn't until August/September of 42 that the first real defeats were affected on land, Milne bay and Guadalcanal but yeh the offensive had pretty much petered out by May/June
though in China they were still taking lots of territory clear into 1944.
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Uh, really ? "....Japan held on to almost all their gains until they got nuked. Even then they weren't invaded and they got to keep their Emperor."
Wow! Lets see the US had totally throttled Japanese shipping and resources and food could not get into Japan. The US was in Okinawa !!!! They had lost most of their islands except the ones the US decided to bypass. They were nuked so the US could force surrender and not have to invade and then the US occupied the country and hanged the war criminals.
They still had all of their gains in China and the DEI and Singapore and all of Indochina and all their home islands. It took nukes to knock them out. All-in-all they did much better than the Germans with much less of an industrial base. They didn't do very well, but they still did 10 times better than the Germans.
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Why not an option? I'm reading Tooze right now. Just started so definitely don't have a complete picture... But what strikes me most so far is if the theoretical argument is that Germany was unable to ramp up military production due to near-wrecked economy then how did it happen in real life in 1942-1944? Availability of some critical imports was actually considerably lower than in 1939-1940 but still they managed to increase production 2-3 times.
So far I'm sticking to the obvious view that you need to differentiate between two issues. First is the civilian economy, "normalcy of every day life", political desire to keep raising the living standards for the wide swathes of population and resources required to attain that. The other issue is increasing military output in mobilization mode by switching massive parts of GDP into military gears and putting up to work as much reserves as politically attainable.
I'm looking forward on how Tooze plays out on the first issue but it seems to me it's hard to argue that the Germany WAS able to resolve the second issue as the history proves. And why exactly do we believe what was done in 1942 couldn't have been done in 1939-1940? There's at least one argument I know and that is the view that German population would have rebelled if the economy was mobilized in 1939-1940 when there was no sense of "Mother Germany In Danger".
So what do you think?
The pre-1942 non-mobilization is a myth and the post-1942 production miracle is as well. What we know is that German production never actually got going in the same way that production did in the USA (much, much more quickly), the UK and the USSR. It never got going and it began to collapse in 1943.
It seems to be difficult to realize just how much better Japan did in WWII than Germany. With a much smaller industrial base, the Japanese managed to seize all the essential resources they needed and hold on to almost all their gains until they got nuked. Even then they weren't invaded and they got to keep their Emperor. Germany never got its production going and was completely crushed and divided up. The comparison suggests the fantastic incompetence that it took to take a reasonably good industrial power and wreck it steadily from 1931 to 1945.
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He's definitely exemplary. At least in breadth
I've got another book of him - "Statistics and the German State", 333 pages devoted to perturbations of economical statistics in Germany in 1900-1945. My, my But I've always been scary of putting all my eggs in one basket.Sorry, didn't quite get the Horace Geeley line...
Seems like Tooze has some special agenda in tearing down "Speer myth"
I mean it's obvious Speer wasn't Harry Potter. No magic wand 
And anyway he couldn't have done retooling in 1934 as he wasn't the "retooling tsar" in 1934. Not arguing with you - just funny how Tooze puts it.Well, I think Tooze has to tear into Speer because (in Tooze's view), the Speer myth holds up a lot of misconceptions. For example, that Germany had not mobilized fully before 1942. The fact was ( according to Tooze) that Germany never could mobilize as fully as the USA or the UK or the USSR essentially because economically, Germany was just an unusually large France -- burdened with an incredibly inefficient agricultural sector that it was politically impossible to do anything but make more complex and useless.
So if anything Germany started over-mobilizing far too soon. Other problems with the Speer mythos cover such odds and ends as the supposed non-impact of allied bombing. According to Tooze, as you might expect, blowing up factories actually had such a big impact immediately (in 1943) that the wonder of Speer is demonstrably just the wonder of a long parts pipeline coupled with measuring units that got priorities (eg the semi obsolete me-109) versus essential units (such as fuel and trucks) that either never were produced in sufficient quanities or that declined under the impact of the war (eg. bombing and loss of oil fields).
Anyway, read Tooze and the Horace Greeley event will become clear.
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And now the question: whom do you read on the topic of Nazi Germany economy apart from Speer and Tooze? Mason? Overy?
I would just read Tooze. He is the most recent and he takes ideology and its contradictions into the account.
The Wages of Destruction is quite an astounding book really. Once you get through with the influential German dude with "Horace Greeley" as his middle name -- you're ready for anything and Tooze doesn't pull any punches: Germany looks like a trainwreck from 1931 to 1945. Not only that but you will have a pretty good idea why. For example, Speer's miracle was due to retooling in 1942, a retooling that should have been done in 1934.
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The old notion of tank catching fire more easily because they use petrol is a bit of a myth, sure is it flammable as opposed to combustible (considerably higher ignition temperature) but the temperatures in a tank cook up don't make the difference a significant issue. The "Ronson" moniker of the Sherman was more about its vulnerable ammunition and it wasn't the only tank to suffer this affliction, the Panther was another.
But for sure the Bren Carrier was an open topped lightly armour vehicle so everything in it was vulnerable including the fuel tank.
I'd look at them more as a tracked jeep rather than a tankette.
I dimly recall the Monmouths, who replaced a Rifle Brigade Bn in the infantry Bn that traveled with the 23 Hussars in the 11th armored (159 Bde? 129 bde?) just before Blue Coat were notorious for preferring to ride on tanks rather than in Bren Gun carriers. But even riding on tanks can be a fire hazard since sometimes the exhaust pipes would set things on fire.
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IPut Scheer-like people in charge of industry and go to Total War economy in '40 or even earlier.
Not really an option. See Tooze. The basic problem with the German economy was an unbelievably inefficient agricultural sector. What the
UK fixed in the 18th century with enclosures, the US with mechanization and the USSR by shooting the Kulaks, the Germans bumbled and (like the French) just caved in to rich peasants. So after say, 1931, they are doomed unless they follow the lead of the USSR and have ford motors build them some 5-year-plan wonders, collectivize, and purge the army (shoot all those Prussian Generals before they start plotting) and join the USSR and take over the world.
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Yes Germany could have won the war, if only Chamberlain had stood with the Czechs instead of caving at Munich. That would have been the encouragement Beck required to go ahead with the planned coup in 1938 and removed the bastard driving the country to war. That would have been the real victory - war averted.
Good point.
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Oh and read Tooze. His information is very persuasive. For a book on economics it is fascinating. (Wow, that is not a sentence I would have ever believed would leave my lips or tapped into my computer!)
Yes, read Tooze. If there is a moral to the question, it is "So read Tooze."
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The answer to number 1 (throttle up before the war) is that Germany was so up-throttled for war that they more or less was FORCED to go to war in 1939 as they othewise had to decide between crashing their economy BIG TIME in early 1940 at the latest or halving their military budget right away and hope that their economy would survive. About 60% of the total German production BEFORE the war started was going to the Wehrmacht and it was impossible to increase that or even sustain it for lack of raw material.
There were even coal shortages in the early war despite the fact that Germany was the biggest producer in Europe, that was because all the trains were moving troops, arms and ammunition instead of coal as the Reichbahn's budget had been cut to the bones for the last ten years to fuel the rearmament.
In other words, Hitler gambled EVERYTHING on a war in 1939 or early 1940 at the latest as he believed that the Western powers (supported by the US) would outproduce Germany in the long run, 1939 was his only shot and he believed that he had to take it or accept that Germany would be a secondary power for all future (he had pretty much managed to wreck the German export industry since 1933 and the entire economy was in stagnation except for the enormous surge in arms production in the 1930s).
If you want to get a very interesting view of the economics involved I can recommend Adam Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction'.
Yep. Tooze pretty much answers the question. The best thing Germany could have done was to let inflation run up in 1931, gotten their exports in order, turned commie in 1938 after recapitalizing, gotten russian backing, crushed Poland etc. and taken the rest of Europe by 1943. Clobbering Fascist Austria, Italy, Roumania, Hungary, Greece and Spain would have just been icing on their Commie German Cake. So they stop with control of the Baltic, Mediterreanean and North Sea. Then the USSR cleans up Japan and Peace with the USA reigns as the colonial empires are divided up.
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For those few who bought CMAK and still enjoy it, just remember that you're in the minority. Maybe this time you'll be in the majority and lose interest after time, just like most people who bought CMBO. It's just how it goes.
Steve
Oh boy. CMAK was my favorite of the old CMs. I got CMSF and added marines and stopped there since I mostly played red on red.
I expect I'll get all the CMBN follow-ons since WWII is pretty much a red-on-red event.
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The problem of WEGO vs. pausable RT is not a issue of control, but of feedback (at least in bigger scenarios). If I could rewind time in RT to see what had been going on here and there, I would never play WEGO again.
I play RT partly because I enjoy all the surprises inherent in not knowing exactly what is going on.
Questions about what exactly happen often remain.
For example, the AI I had set up somehow surprised me from the flank. A whole panzergrenadier company (I assumed since I'd set them up) was coming right up the road to my hastily re-deploying paratroopers. The trooper platoons were caught in the open in the middle of moving away from the pg company. It looked like the troopers were just going to get mowed down if they stayed where they were or ran for it, so I put them all on assault and sent them head-on into the pgs. When I got back to check on them, one squad was wiped out almost completely and the rest were okay. There was no sign of the PGs. or at least none that I could see from a quick 9 second look-see. I still don't know what happened there.
I've got another book of him - "Statistics and the German State", 333 pages devoted to perturbations of economical statistics in Germany in 1900-1945. My, my 
And anyway he couldn't have done retooling in 1934 as he wasn't the "retooling tsar" in 1934. Not arguing with you - just funny how Tooze puts it.
Scenario Editor AI
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
You can trigger support fire. It tends to go off a bit early since it starts as soon as you spot the support fire target.