Melchior
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Posts posted by Melchior
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The combat myths aren't even the most harmful ones to me. The most harmful myths of the war were the political ones that we hear today. The Wehrmacht was innocent of war crimes, and that the Nazis-whatever you thought of them-fixed Germany's economy!
It's a testament to how effective a liar Joseph Goebbels was that people unknowingly spout his nonsense 70 years later.
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I kinda, sorta disagree. Scoring hits is one thing; suppression is another. And suppression is Good. If you have ammo for it, why not tell a few rifle sections to lay fire at known or suspected enemy positions from the back while your maneuver elements move in? Your enemies can become suppressed even by rifle fire buzzing safely over their heads, and while they're suppressed they will be safer to approach. Likewise your attacking infantry can become suppressed by friendly machinegun fire even though there's no friendly fire to worry of, so it's a fine idea to plan your avenues of fire and approach not to overlap too much.
Absolutely. Again, composition matters here. German rifle squads in particular can be lethal out to 800m and can easily suppress freaking Browning teams at that range if they get a few good licks in early. Nothing i'm stating is an absolute, but really more an "in my own experience" sort of thing.
I admit I personally don't have a lot of confidence in the ability of rifle squads to suppress distant targets. Not enough focus in their fire and they usually can't sit still for long before the ominous arrival of nearby spotting rounds forces my hand anyway.
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Frankly, CM has done a great job illustrating why the First World War was such a bloodbath. Better leadership and arming of infantry can only go so far. Reality is unsupported infantry can't be expected to accomplish much on their own. Personally I avoid the use of infantry for direct combat except when they're advancing on targets they have an obvious numerical advantage to. Or if the target has already been pummeled by fire.
Attacking infantry are better off doing as little actual attacking as possible, and really more seizing and holding ground that has already had the ever loving crap bombarded out of it. The Germans realized this, that's why tanks were the core of their force and infantry were a supporting arm. Everyone else was still thinking like 1918. That all being said, if you really must use in infantry in an assault role, keep a couple of things in mind.
1. Rule of thumb, 200m max. Beyond that most men in the squad aside from the machine gun can't and won't hit much. Anything inside that range should be carefully considered based on composition. A German rifle squad with its generous assortment of MP40s and MG42/34s can pretty comfortably close to point blank assault and triumph. A homogeneous Italian rifle team not so much.
2. The Machine Gun is your best friend and worst enemy. Especially for the Armies that lack enough squad-level firepower. Use and abuse those Brownings/SG43s/Bredas. The machine gun's reputation as a defensive weapon kind of obscures how useful it is for attack.
3. Your infantry are doing great if the whole squad manages 1-2 kills the entire match for few losses. Again, try to attack or advance on targets that have *at least* been attacked and challenged already. Infantry do great when the targets they're attacking either can't, or won't, fight back.
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I use both, but for any scenario larger than medium I typically go WEGO. Real time becomes too unwieldy at that size and their is too much going on not to have replay.
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wadepm - first the last, Russia had only twice the manpower of Germany. First to last, Russia had only equal industrial capacity to Germany. But it mobilized more men than that ratio, it sustained casualties above that ratio without any fall off in field strength from the end of 1942 to the end of the war, and it outproduced Germany in tanks by 2 to 1 from that equal industrial base. The Russians were flat out better than the Germans at force mobilization and they tried epically harder than the Germans did. That, not size or prewar population, was the main source of their edge in combat in the second half of the war. With an assist in the last year or so from the western allies, to be sure.
You don't take 4-5 to 1 losses from 2 times the base and win by numbers alone.
To be honest I think more than any other reason, (though plenty were contributing factors) the biggest reason Operation Barbarossa failed was because the Red Army didn't simply collapse outright like the French Army did. A lot units were bypassed, surrendered, or destroyed sure, but enough of the Red Army simply held on and kept fighting and that totally broke the Wehrmacht's tight, fragile timetables. The war sort of revealed that surrounded units that simply keep fighting even if poorly can screw an advance if they're in the right place. Hitler simply planned on the Red Army collapsing as fast as the Allies did in France and when that didn't happen everything spun out from there.
I mean their are people who believe the Invasion of France might had turned into a disaster at Sedan if the French had only reacted to it. They just made no effort. I don't find that idea terribly unreasonable.
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Milnerds always claim to want realism but in the end what they really want to do is live out power fantasies. This is what so called "munchkins" do in P&P rpgs or why the Mechwarrior games all suck because of laser boating. That's why loads of awful milsims degenerate into a disastrous micro-management exercise with broken user interfacing and stilted, boring combat carried out by robots. They're click-fest games built into shallow, predictable gameplay environments that encourage rote-understanding of mechanics and little else.
They want a game they can easily win with a "right answer". They don't want confusion, fragility, or luck. Even though a close study of war and human conflict reveals how huge those factors are. I mean god forbid we should humanize war right? People might actually realize why it's so horrible then.
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Too add to JasonC's post, modern defensive measures were the very reason tanks became so important during the 20th century. Those overlapping machine guns fields and anti-personnel traps were extremely effective against men, but against a tank your attack options are heavily restricted. Most units simply did not posses weapon systems that could do much to a tank. Much like how Knights in medieval europe presented a very serious, and likely very fatal, opponent to a peasant levy because they were just so damn hard to kill with the weapons available.
Anti-tank guns can inflict a lot of casualties on armor, but the war revealed tanks still usually came out on top, especially as their average weight increased. A big reason for this is simply that anti-tank guns are not very flexible, not very practical above a certain weight threshold, and not common enough to be everywhere all at once on the front.
For example, in around 4 years the Germans managed to build a ridiculous number of Pak 40s, some 40,000 of them. And totally included them in their elaborate defensive planning. The conclusion the German Army came to about towed anti-tank weapons was that this still simply wasn't good enough. Their were too many holes in a defense armor could still maneuver through. Hence why the German would seek to awkwardly duct-tape and weld every Pak 40 they had to basically any chassis that could carry it.
Reality was for most of the 20th century the only thing that could stop a horde of tanks was another horde of tanks.
The thing about memoirs recording the daring exploits of units that survived the Eastern Front, bear in mind that's something of a self-selecting group. Nobody's going to write a memoir that ends "...and we were all annihilated down to the last man." Which leaves out 70%+ of the German units that had fought on the Eastern Front. Also first person accounts of enemy casualties inflicted are notoriously far off. From Caesar to the Kuwait war, initial accounts are sometime off by a factor of 10. I recall an after-action report following a Japanese counter-attack on a Marine position claimed ten times more Japanese tanks destroyed than the Japanese had brought to the battle. Sometime fog of war can be very thick indeed.I read Rebentisch's 23rd Panzer Division recently and I must say I totally agree. 23rd isn't a bad source, it's a very detailed, but Rebentisch pretty shamelessly embellishes the fighting capabilities of the German Army in the book. More than once he describes the Russians as a bunch of incompetent vodka-drunk lunatics who would gleefully send thousands of men off on pointless suicide missions. Sadly like a number of popular German accounts of the war the pungent stench of Nazi rhetoric about "untermensch" is detectable in the writing I think.
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Crews would leave their guns during artillery strikes to hide in dugouts but that doesn't have to be represented directly in the game. I'd really like to see infantry not in the weapon-team able to recrew another team's abandoned weapon myself but i'm sure Battlefront would to. It's a coding problem as far as I know.
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The crew must abandon the tank if it catches fire. Their are countless cases of this happening in WW2 with molotov cocktails. Though improvised firebombs were unreliable and had to be spammed to really start a consistent fire. A flamethrower will definitely force the crew to abandon the vehicle. A fire over the intakes will choke the engine and possibly get sucked into the engine compartment.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Flamethrowers were not choice anti-tank weapons though. Attacking a tank with one involved all kinds of bravery/stupidity and usually happened only under very circumstantial conditions. If it's too much of a pain to code, we might as well just stick with the current abstractions for infantry close assault on armor.
We are not using NBC-proofed modern tanks here. We are using WWII tanks with plenty of openings in them and engines that are not exactly fireproofed like most modern tanks are.Many tanks had fire suppression systems in World War 2, but they were designed to stop an accidental fire like from an overheating or leaking engine. Not a fireball engulfing the compartment.
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Weapon crews are armed and can double as infantry in a pinch. (And they often did.) You might also want to save them if artillery is being dialed in on their position. Better than losing everyone.
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I'm not sure how consistent it was, but generally weren't forests a bad place to be when artillery fell on them? When trees were hit by shells they would splinter and contribute to fragmentation, thick enough canopies might also set off shells causing an air burst effect. Perhaps the lethality of artillery should be boosted in forests?
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Perhaps squads could be abstracted as never running completely out of ammo. Being "out of ammo" could impose a severe rate of fire and morale penalty instead.
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Yep, that was me.
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While I find those sight pictures a chuckle too, I have a hunch that no one who designed the weapons actually intended for men to use them to fire at specific targets beyond around 400m or so. Remember that the lessons of the musket age had already de-emphasized personal marksmanship and emphasized unit-wide massed fire. We aren't talking about an officer barking "shoot that man 2km away none of you can even see" as much as "shoot that berm/hilltop/building 2km away".
Problem was around the same time the modern machine gun was invented, and it could do the above job much better than any other weapon. Few in the 1890s had any inkling of just what kind of effect on war Hiram Maxim's weapon would have.
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Well, substantial numbers of vehicles might be lost permanently if the front was overrun or recovery vehicles were unavailable. It also didn't help that most tanks in WW2 had no substantial protection for their ammo. If the main gun ammunition cooked off the tank was a total loss no questioned asked. That being said, tanks would indeed be recovered and sent back into action as soon as they could be re crewed, sometimes without even repairs. I heard of an instance somewhere on the eastern front where a Panzer III was knocked out 4 consecutive times in one day. Don't quote me on that though.
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Normally, an AT-rifle should at least be able to destroy the connection of the single parts of the track - and so, to immobilize the tank...
Regards
Frank
The track itself wasn't as good a target as the wheels were. They were much easier to hit and cracking them would immobilize the vehicle for days because they were just such a pain to repair.
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I heard Bazooka teams were an often used tactic to hunt errant Panzers that had broken through the line. Clearly the Bazooka's problems were never so severe that it was worthless. Troops complain about everything though and the Bazooka would have had a bad reputation even if it fired homing smart rockets.
Reality was by 1944 the Allies were too redundant and too battle wise for a Panzer breakthrough to simply collapse the whole front as it did in 1940. Even if it got very deep. Operation Barbarossa likely failed because the Red Army didn't collapse as the Germans had hoped it would. While many Russians did surrender, many also didn't, and the small pockets of resistance trapped behind German lines would totally throw off a Blitzkrieg's fragile timetables. That was just what happened at the Bulge after all. It just threw the Germans off balance so much when isolated enemy units chose to keep fighting instead of routing.
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An overly optimistic description of the general success of German counterattacks, at least in the second half of the war. They succeeded occasionally, but failed at least as often: Mortain, Arracourt, Operation Nordwind, Lake Balaton... I could go on.
That assessment isn't wrong either. While operating on an offensive mindset even while nominally fighting defensively German leadership was often inclined to conduct piecemeal attacks on ambitious objectives. While this attitude worked great in 1939-41 it started to become a liability as support options dwindled and the seriousness of losses grew. Glorious Death Rides especially became the norm in the Heavy Panzer Brigades, which would often smash right through Allied lines only to maroon themselves kilometers behind the front after their infantry screen was eroded away and they ran out of gas and ammo.
The German Army never had enough ARVs and the sheer weight of vehicles like the Panther and Tiger sure didn't help the recovery situation either.
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Wasn't the preferred tactic to have a defense in depth such that the Soviet spearhead would lose all momentum until ripe for counter attack? That counterattack would need some assault AFVs I think.
Perhaps I have never fully realized just how much the tactical situation on the East Front had evolved to the Soviets favor by mid-1944.
The Germans avoided purely defensive fighting and carried out localized counter offensives in every theater of the war. Usually led by Panzer Divisions these counter attacks were notorious for punching salients into Allied lines that the Allies would then commit to attacking in the hope of cutting off and annihilating valuable formations in them such the Panzers or Waffen SS. Only to find that the Germans usually withdrew those formations almost as soon as their forward momentum stopped, and instead replaced them with kilometer after kilometer of dug in infantry and anti-tank positions.
From what i've read, defensive prepwork like trenches and foxholes were relatively neglected in the training of the German Army. More than a few Commanders complain about this such as Ernst Rebentisch and I think Guderian somewhere too. The reasoning for this was that being on the defensive sort of implied something had gone seriously wrong and the German Army was better off going on the offensive even when woefully impractical to do so.
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And came up with the Jagdpanther!.
And explicitly avoided using the Panzer Divisions to stop Russian breakthroughs unless no other option was available. The Germans learned a lot from their experience in the war and one of the biggest lessons they learned was that tanks are very good at killing each other mutually. Thus it was preferable to avoid expending precious Panzers and crews fighting tanks the Allies would replace in a month if lost.
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Are people on the internet still figuring out that armored warfare was far from an exact science? In both simulation and reality?
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The Germans also made extensive use of half tracks in the SPW or recon companies. Which were often composed of infantry mounted in Sdkfz 250 derivatives. As i'd heard though these companies were quite often depleted of their armored vehicles though because they just had to be pressed into combat so much as armored infantry that the vehicles were usually lost.
Plus, the Germans emphasized a very aggressive form of reconnaissance that basically called upon picking fights with enemy recon and infantry screens in order to divert their attention from the main force. Recon was about the toughest job in the German Army short of the Engineers.
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Well in reality the Soviets did wage a number of proxy wars against the west through burgeoning communist states in the third world. Pretty much the only acceptable method for anything less than outright World War as far as Soviet leadership was concerned. Of course the problem with this strategy was that Soviet leadership wasn't for it.
I didn't pick it up from any single source but in my opinion the Soviets just did not take non-European communist regimes seriously. They only cared about Cuba insofar as they could use it as a forward base against the US. They did not care a wink about Kim Il Sung, or Ho Chi Minh, largely because their interpretations of communism were not the Soviet interpretation (Soviet interpretation essentially being Russian hegemony). Racism also played no small part, so much of which was aimed towards the Chinese that Mao virtually broke off relations with the Soviet Union not long after Stalin died. Not that the two of them ever got along.
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As I said, they prioritized based on what they thought would win them the war, not what would increase survivability of their forces. That was a deliberate decision made in concert with many other shrewd prioritizations. And it definitely allowed them to win the war. It also allowed a large number of Soviet soldiers to not see that victory as they were dead.
Steve
The Soviets were students of their own history, and had come to the conclusion that Russia took heavier casualties when on the defense than when on the offense. This conclusion had also proven true when Napoleon invaded and then Hindenburg. This may also have unfortunately led to the many piecemeal offensives the Red Army carried out in 1942 that did little but waste men and equipment. It was however later refined into the titanic assaults that became Bagration and Vistula Oder. Soviet Deep Battle. Thus as far as Stakva was concerned, winning a war and surviving a war were one in the same for Soviet Russia. Their would be no negotiated settlements, no armistice, no truce. Half way measures that had literally never-ever worked for Russians in the past, in the Red Army you either went big or went home. This mentality was later reflected in the Warsaw Pact and Group Soviet Forces Germany during the Cold War.
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They also highly valued the Valentine and to some degree the Sherman too.
I heard both vehicles frequently ended up being used for Reconnaissance. Seems like a misuse, but then again the Germans used lots of armored cars and half tracks for recon so I can imagine they had difficulty performing proper screening when the opposition was likely to consist of 30+ ton armored vehicles.
The German motor vehicle production was a mess. I mean a huge and ungodly mess. Their approach to production stands out, in my mind, as the best example of how inefficient and incompetent German production was for most of the war.
What's really weird to me is how the Germans would somehow manage to build utter hordes of some weapons, like the Pak 40 or Bf 109 but were absolutely befuddled with 400 different models of Opel Blitz. Which made proper mass production of those trucks impractical. No wonder so many Panzer Divisions subsisted on captured trucks. Not that those vehicles make the parts and readiness situation much easier.
Oh, and to be fair to the Soviet Union, there was one other major combatant that did not have armored infantry transport; Italy.
Steve
Italy was just starting to figure out in 1940, in the desert, the importance of basic motorization. I'm sure Commando Supremo had proposals for armored infantry carriers, but rejected them based on expense. Probably right, but a better idea might had been to re purpose all those worthless pre war Fiat and Carro-Armato tanks into infantry carriers by simply removing the turret and cutting most of the superstructure down. Much like the Kangaroo carrier.
Russian tanks suck?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
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The T34's gun in 1941 was enough to kill about 99% of the tanks it could possibly run into anyway. Fact is the T34 was pre-Barbarossa design of only around 24-26 tons. What they got out of a chassis that should have been retired to secondary duties sometime in 1943 was impressive. The nature of the war though meant that no opportunity could be passed up because a fancy new tank model was working its way into the lines. Delays don't win the war. Look what happened to Citadel because Hitler wanted the Panzer Divisions to reequip with Panthers and Tigers first.