BletchleyGeek
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Posts posted by BletchleyGeek
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That must be the new CMBS module?
QuoteDo I spy an M60/M48 In the far treeline?
Where did you get those binoculars comrade?
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1 hour ago, BletchleyGeek said:
Actually works exactly in reverse to that, verified that spending all smoke rounds zeroes out HE ammo in FR a couple weeks ago. I think I raised this matter on the helpdesk like in 2017... so I have come to accept it as a feature.
Not Fire and Rubble, I wish!, but Final Blitzkrieg.
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48 minutes ago, ASL Veteran said:
If I recall correctly there are no separately tracked smoke rounds in the sense that they come from an entirely different pile of ammo than the HE rounds. If the HE is expended then the smoke is expended as the smoke rounds listed is a subset of the HE rounds. The reverse is not true though in that if you expend all of your smoke rounds then the remaining HE rounds can still be fired. Not really sure why they did it like that, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Actually works exactly in reverse to that, verified that spending all smoke rounds zeroes out HE ammo in FR a couple weeks ago. I think I raised this matter on the helpdesk like in 2017... so I have come to accept it as a feature.
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I got that sense Chuck
Too bad I am at Melbourne. I would route you to FGM if you don't know it, you may find someone in your same TZ to player real-time or wego live over a connection.
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10 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:
I never addressed the man only the non sensical rules.
Mate, "the man" is the main author of the rules. If a random person walking down the street, took a look at your front yard and yelled in the general direction of your house "your garden is a shambles, what nonsense!" you'd probably not be amused.
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On 6/29/2020 at 4:03 AM, Heirloom_Tomato said:
11. Use your smoke rounds
after using all your HE.
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Happy New Year to you too @Battlefront.com. Congratulations for scoring significant business successes in a year with so much uncertainty and chaos as this one.
I wish you guys to keep scoring like that throughout 2021, hopefully in an easier environment.
All the best!
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1 hour ago, BFCElvis said:
That is Steve's thing. I'd be surprised if he didn't post something.......even if it isn't tonight. But he hasn't said anything to me one way or the other. I'm only speculating.
Maybe Steve will just spend his New Year's Day playing some strategic war game or doing something else that brings him joy. That's how I spent mine.
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27 minutes ago, SimpleSimon said:
It's just that even looking at the Bren from MG42 Mountain paints a misleading picture. It leaves out that the British expected the Bren to work in tandem with a 2in mortar, sniper teams, engineers etc all under the cover of the battalion's mortars and HMGs. This was all fully appreciated by the Germans too, but wielded differently because from that view the squad's machine gun is the main effort, everyone else supports it. The pyramid of support is inverted, it's bottom-up rather than top-down. That's why if you were to give the Wehrmacht the Bren they'd be inclined to look at it and go "oh we don't have much use for that".
Excellent write up @SimpleSimon. Each weapon is just a component in a system. While, philosophically, almost all WW2 armies were on the same page regarding concepts, they sometimes differed wildly in the approach to bring about abstract concepts like "fire and maneuver". Comparing weapons 1:1 is only meaningful if they are playing equivalent roles on those systems.
My contribution to this thread is that the CW armies favoured organisations in "fours" rather than "threes" or "twos". So a CW Bn packs actually 33% more "mass" than a German one. It is not uncommon to find that one CW Bn can carry an assault (where it is difficult to exploit high ROF weapons like the MG42) by sheer numbers, where I would need two German 44 Bns (or three VG). This heft, when augmented with AFVs and timely mortar/artillery support, can be devastating.
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11 minutes ago, Commanderski said:
I wonder if they are doing a Bones Post this year...it's getting kind of late in the day.
They had to run to the chemist to get enough bromide to dip the bones in...
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I hope your dad recovers alright and thanks for the post @Ithikial_AU. Enjoy the Xmas break and I'd like to wish a happier 2021 to you and your family!
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23 hours ago, BFCElvis said:
Right now there are 24. Pretty big number. We're waiting for a couple of things to be added and there have been threats that once they are there might be another battle or 2. Also, sometimes scenarios get pulled at the last minute for one reason or the other.
One of the reasons we don't like to get into that is that it isn't an accurate number until the game ships. It isn't impossible (although it is unlikely) that the module ships with 2 campaigns and not 5. Nothing is chiseled in stone until it is released. Rome to Victory ended up having more scenarios than the original pre-order details said . I think the pre-order announcement said 8 and I think it shipped with 15 (note to self....check to see if the website properly reflects what the module shipped with). That was one of the very few good things about the extraordinarily long time between pre-orders opening and final release. And also, there were a couple of "hey, guys. Is it too late to add another?"
Cheers John - I am the kind of guy who is happy with a ballpark figure
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Those two battle campaigns sound like an interesting concept. Looking for to play them.
.... aaaand out of curiosity, how many scenarios are shipping with Fire and Rubble?
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3 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:
The Italians lost 642 men KIA, 2631 wounded, and 616 missing. Over 2,100 got frostbite.
Those look like pretty serious losses, how many forces took part in this disaster? 6 or 8 binaria divisions?
BTW, sounds a lot like the performance at the invasion of Greece. I highly recommend the Italo-Greek scenarios in Command Ops 2 to study that campaign.
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2 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:
classify his approach as "data driven" and proceed along the same course I think.
Haha, I think you're right. It's all about having the right filter for the data
2 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:It did not help that the Generals and other politicians of Italy did not speak as one voice ever, but as disjointed and competing service branches busy chasing personal prestige and promotions.
This also was an important factor for the Third Reich decision making, but my understanding is that GROFAZ was actively encouraging that competition and division amongst services (and also within a single service!). For instance, I am not sure it make so much sense to have two different "Oberkommandos", most of the time in open competition for resources, assets, recognition and using parallel intelligence services. I always found confusing that there was an OKW (high command of the armed forces), and an OKH (high command of the army), and the former wasn't in hierarchy superior to the other. The logical thing would have been to have an OKW and then theater OK's.
Was Mussolini also encouraging this kind of "competition"? -
1 hour ago, SimpleSimon said:
When chairing meetings Mussolini had a tendency to address issues he had answers for and simply ignore those he had nothing on.
This year I have been in SO MANY Zoom meetings where my colleagues were just like this. Sure this approach has a name...
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I would be happy to send an Amazon gift card to cover the cost of the book
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4 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:
Only 10 of the 72 Divisions in the Army were full manned, and 22 didn't exist at all. Enough fuel was on hand for 4 and a half months. All of Italy's anti-aircraft guns were from the First World War and the Air Force had enough fuel to fly its 1,769 airplanes for two months. But hey, the Navy is probably ready to go at least right?
That pretty much answers my question regarding the offensive in Western Egypt...
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4 hours ago, Commanderski said:
Otherwise it looks like it was built that way even with bullet holes and cracks.
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20 minutes ago, SimpleSimon said:
Much was expected to be made up for by highly abstract notions romanticized by Fascism like Strength of the Will and racial superiority and such. Dash and daring certainly played a role in the field, but too often they were expected to substitute for military science and Italy seems to have avoided serious punishment for that due to the feeble nature of the enemies it had faced thus far.
That's a very interesting observation, thanks for sharing.
The disasters in Western Egypt and Greece were quite a double whammy, looking forward to next installments!
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8 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:
There was certainly far less of a concrete "vision" in Mussolini's mind of his New World Order. It resembled something vaguely along the lines of the Roman Empire's territorial outline, but it was never anywhere near as specific as the Nazis plans for a Neo-Germania Superior which was clearly laid out in Generalplan Ost. The chapter after Spain goes into something of an interlude covering just those questions though Bletchley, Gooch's narrative this time is just more focused on the application of Mussolini's aims than the thinking although there's still plenty on that. For now it seems that Gooch wanted to get out a narrative of the distinctly pre-World War fighting that Italy engaged in before 1939.
Cheers Simon, that's was very useful.
I am not a big fan of Beevor but he did a good job summarising the main political and military aspects of the Spanish Civil War. Hugh Thomas' "The Spanish Civil War" work is still the to-go reference (the revised 2001 edition remains a standard mandatory text across all History degrees in Spain, as it is remarkable balanced and non-partisan while going to describe the gory details of a very messy war).
8 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:The Italians were somewhat more sober about the lessons they pulled from this conflict, and concluded correctly that the Spanish Civil War had been a somewhat amateur conflict fought between relative lightweights. It would not much resemble the looming major war which was by now on the horizon.
While it is correct that the sides were relative lightweights, materially speaking, the chiefs of staff (and their staffs) were all trained officers. So in terms of the planning and execution, leaving aside the political dimension of military operations and some colourful personalities whose importance was greatly amplified by propaganda, it was pretty much what you could expect from the practices of the German General Staff as set by von Schlieffen (as the Spanish Army was rebuilt in the early 1900s after the Spanish-American War of 1898 pretty much in the image of the Prussian Army). There was a gap indeed in the means, e.g. relying on barely trained militias early in the war and abysmal logistics throughout the conflict, not in the technical knowledge.
What I find surprising of the Italian experience of the CTV is that they didn't realise that actually worked like a charm were combined arms operations based on maneuver and dislocation that exploited a tactical breakthrough had become now possible. For real and not like in 1918 by sheer luck, thanks to improved signal communications and more reliable, longer range, armored vehicles. As you point out, the CTV was very successful when they abandoned the set-piece battle and went for maneuver (enabled by breaching enemy lines of defence).
In contrast, the Condor Legion - the German contingent in Spain - did collect critical experience on what it worked and what did not work from an organisational perspective. Looks like the Italians, and the Soviets, became fixated on the utility of particular pieces of equipment, or how to best employ those pieces of equipment, rather than in the realisation that speed and agility were awesome force multipliers.
I am thinking of the invasion of Egypt in 1940, for instance. While there were plenty of mechanised forces capable of fast attacks and maneuver, the Italian Army preferred to dig in and fortify as if it was 1918, waiting for the unavoidable counterattack. Which came, but certainly not in the way and direction they expected: they basically put their heads in a silver platter for O'Connor to chop it up. Perhaps the problem was that they hadn't figured the logistics at all, and there weren't the means to keep those mechanised forces operating away from the stockpiles in Tobruk or Bardia... but then, why start the offensive at all? What was the rationale?
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5 minutes ago, SimpleSimon said:
The Metropolitan Divisions were stripped of much of their hardware to feed the war and this would translate directly into disaster in 1943 when many of these same units would have literally nothing heavier than small arms to fight the Allies with when they landed.
I wonder if the book will go at length into looking the decision making process of Mussolini and his inner circle to join World War II. I am vaguely aware of it being entirely opportunistic, as in "since the Germans will surely win the war then better we join before is over". If the assumption was that World War II would draw to a quick conclusion, and with the collapse of France, barely anyone was thinking otherwise, then leaving the home army divisions bereft of any heavy equipment was quite rational. The problem was that the assumption proved to be completely wrong, and Italy just didn't have the strategic depth (both in the economical and operational dimensions) to absorb the shock of the tide turning in 1943, as Germany did.
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Too bad I am at Melbourne. I would route you to FGM if you don't know it, you may find someone in your same TZ to player real-time or wego live over a connection.
U.S. Thread - CM Cold War - BETA AAR - Battle of Dolbach Heights 1980
in Combat Mission Cold War
Posted · Edited by BletchleyGeek
Oooh @Bil Hardenberger looking forward so much to this AAR