MengJiaoRedux

This reminds me: a few days ago i was looking for kid shows for my kid and there was Chuck Norris: Ranger: Texas Ranger: Walker: Taledega Nights. Chuck was shooting at a bear. at least I think that was happening in the script. On the screen there was Chuck looking at his rifle in disbelief and there was the bear looking bearish, and then Chuck and then the bear and then Chuck using the scope on his rifle and then the bear (cue bear: furious!) and then Chuck checking to see if the rifle had fired or worked or was hooked up and then the bear: still an angry bear. then some people looking relieved or amused or something. I tried to imagine (during Peppa Pig) what happened with the Chuck Norris sequence: they had the bear footage and they had the Chuck hates-his-rifle footage and they needed to wind up the episode so they increased the drama by splicing together two totally unrelated strips of film. Oh! And I play on Veteran Difficulty. I think I almost always have. Since, oh, 2007 or something.

He's shooting suppressive fire across a river (flat). I'm sure under ideal conditions traversing would be more or less a suppresive barage. But it isn't a death ray.

I think everyone knows what your fantasy is, but I think that only works with fixed MGs that are part of an entrenched defensive scheme as in the 1st world war. Even then you really need barbed wire to keep the approaching enemy in your kill zone long enough to do the proper traversing.

I imagine it is the one about the lethality of dropping people on their heads.

The simple correlation does not seem to occur, probably because it is extremely sensitive to factors not in the game because they don't happen except with fixed MGs with interlocking fields of fire and even then only if you could perfectly time the traversing of the gun with the motion of the targets. I suspect the traversing of a fixed MG would also provide much more suppression than killing simply because it would be a situation that any observer could visualize -- ie traversing a fixed MG produces the effect of a barrage, not a death ray.

This is the most sensible analysis I've seen in this thread and all the more so since apparently the real benefit of the MG42 was in suppressive fire -- dominating an area so that mortar fire could kill off the enemy.

5GTA only had t34s with 76mm guns, and they did stop the German thrust, so they were successful, though not so much against Tigers.

I love this scenario. I have beefed up the Russians since I hope to persuade the AI Germans to simply run away and not do any fighting to the last man. So far (in two runs)....the AI has played interesting games and not many Germans seem to have run away. I mean one does see them fleeing and surrendering but there seems to be a certain amount of fighting to the last man here and there.

It's true his analyses of anything Soviet are pretty cranky, but he is just plain full of resigned disapproval when recounting the wierdness of German behavior -- for example Model's moves to get troops out of commands he was leaving and into commands he was taking over. He spends a lot more time turning a jaded and mildly horrified if slightly amused eye on German administrative mental gymnastics than he does on the Soviets -- no doubt mostly due to his sources which are almost entirely from unpublished German documents. Years of reading that stuff must have had an odd effect on his judgements, but still I think his work is valuable and fun to read.

Glantz's real problem is that he doesn't write very well. He conveys insights by cumulative impact. If you just keep reading and re-reading Glantz, eventually the conditions and human side comes through -- not that Glantz makes that easy -- but he puts in so much that sooner or later you begin to see a lot. My favorites are all the STAVKA comes to visit and where are you? Stories -- Phone calls, teletyping, Army Commanders not at their HQs etc.

A lot of later work is based on Ziemke's work. -- Even Glantz (who of course footnotes his sources very well). There are at least three good things about Ziemke: 1) it is based on a close reading of German Army-level war diaries, so it is accurate about German readings of the enemy, German communications, German intentions and squabbling. 2) The basic analysis is good for somebody writing almost 50 years before the Wages of Destruction came out 3) Ziemke writes very well and has a wicked sense of dark humor that is entirely appropriate for an account based almost completely on unpublished German Manuscript/microfilmed original documents

Yes, it just gets worse and worse. Even if no 152mm shell hits the Tiger, apparently the Russian anti-tank rifles could do some damage to optics. I imagine myself spending a lot of time in CMRT sheparding Tigers through minor problems so that the Su-152 can take a fair shot.

But you have to wonder how exactly all that worked. CMRT should give some idea. I plan on Working my way down from the 152mm and so on, though you have to wonder about getting close enough to hit with such a gun and rate-of-fire.

On the other hand, maybe there are different kinds of data. The really huge losses seem to be based on demographics which in turn are based on what is probably an unreliable census (call that the 1950 loss statement of about 26 million total including civilian and non-combat losses). Next in terms of size of loss is the most recent loss-by-loss tally (call that the 2003 statement -- 13 million) -- but this seems only slightly more reliable than the unreliable census since it is really a matter of deaths over some period for anyone associated with any Soviet armed force and so includes non-combat losses. Finally, there is the official 1993 loss tally of around 8-9 million permanent combat losses (killed, captured and too-wounded to return to combat ever). This 8-9 million figure has some advantages in relating to reality since it fits within the smaller range of census numbers and is roughly equal to non-combat losses in that scenario plus it is only about twice the Axis losses on the Eastern Front. All of which seems reasonable to me.

Yes, so it is odd that more recent books like Absolute War and more recent Glantz books are trending toward much lower combat losses (killed, captured, too-wounded to get back to fighting). The problem may be that, if you look at the extremes (the dubious census figure of almost 200 million Russians -- Absolute War suggests that is off by 10% at least which means total Russian population losses would only be around 12 million AND you have to fit the combat losses into that (plus 4 years of stressed population growth -- say 4 million). If other (non-combat or civilian) and combat are roughly the same then that's 8 million of each which seems to be the number that recent trends point to. Meanwhile at the other extreme, from the point of view of Russian formations asking for replacements (in Glantz) -- for some reason those are nowhere near what you would expect -- implying once again, that the heaviest Russian losses were in the big encirclements of 1941 when whole units vanished. Moreover, if you read carefully, in say Glantz and Army-level German sources, a certain number of Russian units supposedly wiped out (in German accounts), are back in action in less than a month. All of this seems to me to imply that Russian combat losses have been systematically overstated in most sources.

Also, a comedy classic: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-EF-Defeat/index.html This was written from German army level war diaries mostly and is weirdly funny. It's like Glantz with a vicious sense of humor. Wonderfully written. In defense of Glantz, I have to say, he doesn't leave anything out. Once he gets going it all goes in. I've been re-reading the big Leningrad book and, well for better or worse, it is all in there. After a while it is a hypnotic experience, with Russian losses steadily dropping (these days he guesses there were 2 million Russians captured in 1941, down quite a bit from everybody's favorite 3 million estimate of yore). Plus, he used to guess 500,000 Russian casualties for every failed Russian offensive -- which sounds good, but if you add it up that's three times as many people as were in the whole Russian Army, so maybe the more recent and much lower casualty figures that he gives in the more recent books are more correct. Absolute War also gives lower Russian losses, noting that people were counted as missing from multiple organizations by multiple organizations and that there probably weren't that many Russians to start with.

You can't beat Glantz. One of the wonders of the first two books of the Stalingrad trilogy (soon to be 4 books apparently) are the phone calls from STAVKA and amazing tales of Soviet foul-ups and (eventually) triumphs. But I really like Absolute War: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/absolute-war-by-chris-bellamy-462704.html And as ultimate background, The Wages of Destruction is a must: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

Tooze is good on the effects of Allied bombing on industrial production. He says (as you might expect if you had not read the strange versions of history based on Speer's apologetics) the bombing caused major problems right away.

All of those armies and the Soviets had to be handled in the final negotiations, so while they might have been militarily unimportant, dealing with them and keeping out the Soviets were things that potentially gave the Japanese a lot more leverage than the Germans had in May 1945. For that matter, didn't the German army in Italy sign a separate cease-fire? I guess so. A complete surrender actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_World_War_II_in_Europe

Japan still had lots of barginning chips when the time came to surrender -- for example big armies in China and Indochina. It's not too surprising that they got some minor concessions (such as -- and this might be the only one -- keeping the Emperor). Japan was still occupied and totally controlled by the US for a time.

Well, by around Dec 1941, it must have been clear to everyone with access to relatively complete information outside of Germany, that Germany was out of good options -- they had large armies in the field and lots of captured territory, but their railroads had already been falling apart for years and access to critical resources such as oil was only going to get more and more restricted. By early 1942, no realistic Axis plan (including Japan's) envisioned anything more than holding the Allies off until they negociated. The Germans had one more throw at the oil fields in Russia --a wild and flailing grab in the summer of 1942 -- and the Japanese tried for a similar last-minute decisive battle at Midway in the same time frame. In fact, you could probably isolate the critical moment as the destruction of the German thrust at Tikvin in late November. This prevented the isolation of Leningrad and kept the Finns relatively quiet. So in a sense the War in the Pacific started just after the Germans started losing. Of course the war in the Pacific was entirely separate in many ways anyway and it had its own very odd logic.

Didn't Shermans have an extra wide view sighting periscope? In the turret? Which would make them much better at spotting PZIV than a PZIV in any configuration would be? At most ranges?

I'll put in a vote for the Grand Tactical System, though I've only played Where Eagles Dare and Bir Hakeim. One thing I'm interested in simulating in CM on the East Front is that moment in various accounts where the Russians send in their armor "too soon" and it gets bogged down. I find this a little hard to imagine. it seems like it would happen if there was not going to be a successful clean break through rather than a matter of timing.

Ok. That's funny. Yep. The combat mission series is the best tactical game ever. I played a board game (Panzer Grenadier) recently. Or I tried to until I found that the PzIVs had twice the armor rating and twice the friepower of a Sherman. CMBN has cured me of a need to relive other people's Panzer fantasties.

I don't recall. But according to Wikipedia, Remember Baker so impressed the local indians that when they chopped him up they took his head and showed it around in triumph until the British Army made them clean up the mess and bury all of Remember Baker's parts in one place. Which in frontier-speak might run: Remember where you put all of Remember's members! Though perhaps that had to be conveyed in sign language or even Frontier-French.