Melchior

Well I don't know, I think that's a tad unfair. The Soviets saw the value of armored personnel carriers during the war, the problem was they just couldn't justify laying down the resources to build them when proper tanks were just so damn important. In fact no one built terribly good APCs during the war. The best was probably by Hanomag and it was still bulletproof only in the barest sense. Post-war the Red Army built loads of APCs, and later invented the IFV. I don't think it was that they just didn't care. The Soviets ate up things like the M3 Scout Car and Universal Carrier whenever they could. Problem is the M3 did not last long in production and the Universal Carrier was highly valued.

I've actually heard it postulated somewhere that the booty from Germany's early war conquests may damn well have bought the Nazis another year by itself. Between their French, Czech, and Russian captures they were basically able to fully equip the equivalent of several divisions that likely would not have existed without all that slack in things like gun carriers and trucks.

Because they were duty bound by the highly-complex and occasionally contradictory ideals of the "Honorable Prussian Officer" stereotype. Which demanded the utmost loyalty to Germany, the problem was in defining what "Germany" was once Hitler was in power. Sad reality is most of the Army's leadership did not make a distinction between their country and their leader anymore. Partly because of duty, but also because many of them shared Hitler's views. They just weren't as radical about them.

It's important to some extent to understand that we can look back on the direction history took with hindsight. Which is what Erwin is getting at. In 1933 most of the men in His Majesty's Government considered Churchill a fringe rogue and adventurer. Like how Ron Paul is in America. Roosevelt's hands were tied by the overwhelming voice of the isolationist movement. The few men in Washington who were in favor of action were only in favor of action against Japan, not Germany. Although as I recall "Germany First" had pretty much been decided before Marshall even became Chief of Staff.

Another point to no small extent was a sad truth that at the end of the day their were plenty of people in the west who simply did not think Hitler was such a bad guy. The Pro-Fascist movements in France were nothing to sneeze at. Britain was beset by a powerful wave of Red Scare that encouraged them to ignore absolutely everything Hitler was doing so long as he was an enemy of communism and had no ambitions towards the Empire. Throw in no small amount of shared views with the Nazis, such as racism and anti-semitism on the part of everyday people. Call it a hunch, but the only guy in the west who I suspect had Hitler pegged as a complete SOB from Day 1 of his Chancellorship was Roosevelt.

A bad tank is better than no tank.

In most Panzer Divisions captured AFVs were attached to the Division Anti-Tank or Panzerjager group. The Germans made use of captured tanks throughout the entire war, as long as those vehicles could be maintained in service or until expended in combat. Neither of which was planned to be very long.

Whole books have been written about the lies and distortions of truth Heer Officers ran with after the war. Conveniently absolving themselves of any intimate knowledge of Hitler's plans, despite the Einsatzgruppen being heavily composed of Army volunteers. How about guys like Speer and Guderian sitting on top-level committee meetings over the planned use of Jewish slave labor, claiming post war they had "no idea" what was really going on. They probably had to hire a carpenter at the Nuremberg trials to keep shaving their noses down. At least all those crazy Luftwaffe survivors never shied away from telling the ugly truth.

Yeah and that summary would be great, if it wasn't for the fact that testimony from actual Russians who fought in the war reveals a far greater range of feeling about Stalin's regime than the feelings of western bystanders do. I for one, do not buy the idea that the Red Army was nothing but an organization of slave soldiers routinely forced into combat at gunpoint by nasty Commissars. Plenty of men in the Red Army were there because they wanted to be. Conversely, it often surprises people to read about how many draftees comprised the ranks the US Army even after the post-Pearl Harbor enlistment "rush". Russians were fighting for their lives, because the only possible outcome of Nazi occupation of Russia was the end of Russians. With this in mind I hardly find it strange that the Soviet Union was very, very serious about fighting as bitterly as possible. It was truly victory or death. None of the other Allied powers with the exception of China found themselves so close to absolute destruction. Nor do I think any of them would have conducted themselves much differently if their situation had been as dire.

One of these days someone is going to have to try and explain to me why pointing out a 200 year old genocide in some other country makes the Holocaust all okey dokey now. Germany lost the war long before Hitler made his most famous bad moves.

Be careful what authors you read from then because it's important to remember that much of what we in the west think we know about the Soviet Union, even Joseph Stalin, is shrouded in the vale of Cold War propaganda. I saw a poll recently that showed some 1/3 of Russian college students, college students, would vote for Stalin today if he was alive. I doubt it was all the propaganda was lies. Stalin was not secretly a huggy nice guy that western capitalists were just out to character assassinate. He was a ruthless dictator to be sure, but the crimes of the Soviet Union under his control were played up during the 60s while the brutalities the Allies commit in the name of the war (and their were plenty) were ignored or brushed under the rug. For the Americans in particular the Cold War was a gigantic case Pot Kettle Black on so many issues. I understand that to people directly affected by Stalin's rule, he and Hitler were essentially indiscernible from one another. Their were a ton of Russians who fought *for* the Germans after all. An entire Waffen SS Division was made up of Ukrainian volunteers! To the common people of Russia the higher-level thinking of the war was indeed mostly beyond them and they were unfortunately, caught in the middle regardless. I see the reasons people would have for still hating Stalin more than Hitler and completely understand and sympathize. That still does not excuse fighting for the Nazis.

I personally will be very happy to get a Barbarossa Combat Mission. Perhaps with the early war unit set for Germany you could do a "return to the west" module about the Battle of France?

You know I think it's very important that people understand you cannot apply modern values and social progress to historic peoples. Social progress simply wasn't that evolved. I'm not saying people back then were stupid, but you've got to remember formal education was harder to come by. Racism, classism, etc were all ubiquitous in the 1940s, and the world was much larger because transport and communications were hard to come by. So peoples were more isolated and strangers were, well, stranger. It was VERY easy to fall into the trap of dehumanizing foreigners even relatively smart people could make the mistake. See: The Eugenics Movement. Russia was by far much better than Nazi Germany. By the standards of the time Nazi Germany was trying to turn back the clock on social progress by over 1000 years, and was engineering an entire society around killing as many people as possible in a short span of time at the minimum cost. IE: Industrialized murder. Nothing Stalin did compared to the level of planning and thinking that went into the Holocaust. On top of all this, Soviet society and Joseph Stalin were not mutual to each other. Once Stalin died his criminal empire broke apart because he had no line of cronies and successors to continue his brutalities. Hitler on the other hand, planned very much on his dirty work continuing past his death. The "Thousand Year Reich" and such.

My impression was that since the Germans emphasized extreme autonomy on the part of their tankers, it tended to encourage German tank crews to be very aggressive. This was a training holdover from the early Blitz days, where German tanks would often find themselves advancing so quickly the infantry and artillery could barely keep up. Good for killing lots of allied tanks as rapidly as possible, bad for encouraging glorious death rides deep into allied lines where fuel depletion or mechanical breakdown would end a Tiger's/Panther's fun real fast. The Western Allies of 1944 were nothing like 1940 or even 1943. They possessed such mass of force by this point encirclement and destruction of whole armies wasn't going to end the war. I remember reading somewhere though that the biggest problem possessing the Germans tactically in 1944 was a shortage of riflemen. Squad sizes were getting smaller and smaller and things like the Volkssturm were hasty stopgap solutions. Also at the end of the day the grand majority of German tanks were not the Big Cats, they were smaller vehicles like the Mk IV and derivatives of obsolete tanks like the Mk III and 38t. The Germans squeezed surprising usefulness out of these vehicles well past their prime at least.

Every major German AFV is there so it's not like we need that many more vehicles. Personally the 1 AFV i'm really pining to see in BfN is the Jagdpanther. Which given how prolific it was i'm sure i'll probably see it in an expansion sooner or later.

I'm on your side pal. I despise "Hardcore" modes in games. Hey, let's have a game mode where we remove all of the most basic information a human being would have access to in the real world and then act like it's soooooo realistic!

I get a kick out of the idea that people think difficulty and realism automatically equal bad controls and poor interfacing.

Well look at the context. Statistically most tanks killed during the war were killed by AP shot fired from anti tank guns. On top of that it was predicted that a tank would basically spend 90% of its time fighting infantry or other soft units that made up the grand total population of an army. The Sherman's low velocity gun was a problem but considering how rare encounters were with armour that the gun couldn't kill vs. how much more often they'd be dealing with Panzershrecks/fausts or concealed Pak guns it wasn't totally disastrous. The Axis opted to equip almost all of their tanks with high velocity guns but that was because they were pretty used to the infamous Russian tank spam hordes by then. I suppose then you could still hold the Americans responsible for failing to equip more Shermans with the 105mm gun. The US Army was never exactly good at designing ordinance though.

By 1944 I doubt many of those divisions were full strength. Even taking into account the "preferential treatment" the Waffen SS often got.

What was really sad is that this system of TD's the US had probably would have worked out perfectly in 1939-40 when the Panzers rarely followed their own lessons of keeping infantry and artillery close to the armour for support. US TD's were designed specifically to reject attacks from lots of small tanks trying to mob them all at once. But hey that's just what happens when all your knowledge and research is theory and not practice.

Size ain't everything in a naval gun. Bear in mind this is the Western Front, Tigers and Panthers were a hell of a lot more rare in the West than they were in the East at least until the Bulge. I doubt it will happen but It would be cool if BfN simulated the high-breakdown rates of axis vehicles both in a strategic AND tactical sense. You'll be less inclined to use that Tiger all the time if it can self-immobilize.

The belief that Hitler lost D-Day simply by not letting Rommel rush the landing zone with the Reserve Panzers is utter nonsense. In fact, keeping forces near the landing zones probably would have gotten them annihilated. The Allies completely flattened the area around the beaches. Anyone who wasn't sitting under 20 feet of concrete would have been killed in the aerial and naval bombardments. On top of that the many invasions during the Italian campaign solidly revealed what happened when you tried to attack covered landing zones with armour. Disaster. Just look at one Destroyer did to a whole Panzer Division at Anzio. The Germans found out during Italy that if the Allies really wanted a landing zone, they were going to have it and their was nothing you could do. The impotence of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine by this stage of the war basically meant the Allies could perform the most important aspects of an invasion unmolested.

Don't get me wrong. The Americans did the same thing against the Japanese. The Allies treated the war like an epic life or death struggle because who are we kidding, it was. It's just that a lot of hyperbolic drama that emerged post war, clogging today's media and history, came from this propaganda. I mean most Americans still think that losing the Battle of Midway would have meant losing the war.

I'd argue the British did more than any of the other Allies to perpetuate the German super men myth. I mean, between 1936 to 1939 Britain and France totally failed to protect Czechslovakia, or Poland from falling into Axis hands and couldn't even keep Germany from uniting with Austria and the Rhineland. To add to an already steaming cake of **** 1940 saw the fall of France and continental Europe, the invasion of Egypt by Italy, the losses of HMS Royal Oak and Hood in the Atlantic and the initial shock of the Luftwaffe bombing Britain. The British got off to a very rough start in the war and strongly felt they had to rationalize it. What better way than to perpetuate myths like the German super soldiers crap or Hitler being some kind of diabolical evil genius.

Oh I totally agree that leaving 6th Army stuck in Stalingrad was a terrible idea. It's just that a lot of people think the sole reason they were left there was because of Hitler's ego and their was more to it than that. The OKW wasn't making decisions based soley on Hitler's demands. At least not until after he had more or less fired or replaced every good General after 1944. They had reasons for their decision, even if they were shaky. It does though if the Germans *are* the partisans. Northern Italy and the Netherlands were not liberated until after the surrender and both regions contained objectives that could have shortened the war if captured. Instead they remained bullwarks for relatively little expenditure on Germany's part. But the attrition defense strategy wasn't working either. It was obvious the Allies were planning to conduct an offensive operation by early 1945 once their supply lines caught up and their would be no hope of meeting it AND still having enough stuff to deal with the Russians. Of course by Operation Bagration Hitler had more or less given up on the Eastern Front and strongly believed a major victory in the West would lead to an Armistice. The Bulge proved him wrong, and like it or not he was not just going to wait for the West to attack him. Yeah honestly. I might be getting subjective here but a lot of people felt that the whole reason WW2 happened was because the job wasn't finished in WW1. I honestly doubt it would have changed much after the discovery of the major concentration camps. Yup. I'm no fan of the belief that June 6th succeded just because Hitler took a nap. The reality was the Allies brought so much force to bear on D-Day their was basically no stopping them. Omaha Beach was an important objective but it was really the only landing zone that put up a serious fight. Their is also no evidence the defenders would have been able to hold out against the planned 2nd and 3rd landing waves.