Duckman

Zaloga in Armored Thunderbolt says the 4th AD at the time of Arracourt was "equipped with mostly older M4 tanks built in late 1942 and early 1943, but which had undergone the blitz upgrade in the summer of 1943 with the new M34A1 gun mount with telescopic sight and applique armor over their ammo racks". He says they were offered some 76 mm Shermans but turned them down.

Interesting topic. Couple of comments: - Battle fatigue has probably always existed (there are likely references to it in older texts) but one thing that may have mitigated it was that war and combat was more a seasonal thing, not the multi-year and all-year deployments seen in modern conflicts. In other words there was more recovery time. - Van Creveld goes into the WWII situation in some detail in Fighting Power where he compares the US and German armies. He blames the much higher US incidence of battle fatigue on the lack of primary group bonds caused by the lack of regional recruitment policy as well as the well-known replacement system, and also the lack of unit rest and rotation. The Germans despite the pressure they were under managed to do those things right, partly because of tradition and experience from WWI (the US situation improved towards the end of the war when some issues were fixed). He also mentions widespread acceptance of Freudian ideas in American society as a possible secondary explanation. - Research I think suggests humans are somewhat like a battery, with soldiers managing a max of 300-ish days in the combat zone. Rest can recharge the battery but not up to full power. Of course there are outliers in each direction, but for the vast majority those figures should hold.

Belated thanks for the replies. I'll look into your suggestions.

Seems the legacy games went the way of the dodo with the new website and store. Probably because of this I feel an urge to buy the CM1 bundle (had them ages ago on CD but would really like a digital version). Is this impossible? I'll pay!

- Best artillery model. - Best armour model. - Best graphics in a wargame. - Real-time is fun. - Did I mention the artillery model?

They're working their way backwards through WWII, sort of. Whether they'll ever get to 1941 i don'y know, but I hope so. The reason for starting backwards is that there's more of the stuff that people want and recognize (like cool tanks and the invasion of Normandy) then.

I order you to stop making sense!

Thanks. Looks very realtimeish though?

Which is the Battle of the Atlantic game? As for the last part, I agree. The lack of a WWII tank sim is puzzling for starters.

Super interesting article, thanks. In a WWII context i guess it validates the sometimes criticized German choice of a fairly accurate (low shot dispersal) machinegun and the tactic of firing (fairly) aimed bursts with it, even if they may have made those choices for other reasons. The Garand should also fit the bill. I know the general thesis is that theoretical weapon accuracy is the least important parameter, but he also specifically noted the difference in efficiency between the Minimi and SA80 LMG.

I've noticed over the years that there is often a disconnect between the things discussed by wargamers and the things discussed in manuals and memoirs. Wargamers (and history buffs in general) often turn tactical discussions into technical ones that focus on gun size, armour thickness, etc whereas tactical instructions stress things like speed, surprise, coordination, and violence of action. On defence the main things points are usually fire discipline before opening fire and volume of fire after opening fire. One of the many good things about CM is that the increased fog of war compared to most wargames (both board and computer) can lead to a more realistic mentality in my opinion. More overall planning and less micromanagement, if you will. I quite like real/continuous time for this reason.

Pictures of US soldiers in camo in Normandy: https://www.atthefrontshop.com/category_s/97.htm You can definitely see how misidentification would be a problem, especially in this picture:

That's what I remember reading as well. It just wasn't worth the hazard. I think the US Army used some camo gear in the Pacific, as well as the USMC of course. I've also read somewhere that many Allied troops automatically thought German troops in camo were snipers, since they were one of the few Allied troops (as well as British paratroops) that regularly wore camo in the ETO. This apparently contributed to a bit of a sniper scare in Normandy when individual German troops left behind were considered snipers and thereby extra dangerous. (It actually went both ways: there is at least one instance of captured British paratroopers being executed in Normandy, probably because they were mistaken for commandos.)

You can actually play the Total War games like that, with the camera slaved to the general. It's quite an interesting experience and has you running around the battlefield. It also puts even more of a premium on sound prebattle deployment.

A standard complaint from tank people in WWII was that non-armour officers didn't understand this. They parceled out the tanks in penny packets and/or used them in unsuitable terrain. Their own rule of thumb was that tanks shouldn't be used in less than battalion strength, which means we're usually on the low side in CM. Having said that, things like situation and terrain tend to get in the way of theory and data from the Western front shows that big tank-on-tank engagements pretty much died out after the desert. Most engagements from Tunisia onwards were small. Tank-on-tank is of course not the only, or even the ideal, way to use tanks and bigger battles can be cut up into smaller at the tactical level. However it does tell you something about how things went down in the not-so-wide-open landscapes of Western Europe and Italy.

All German infantry were renamed grenadiers mid-war to boost morale, with the exception of the fusilier (light infantry) company in each battalion. Panzergrenadiers were always called panzergrenadiers I think. As for the rifle grenades, I wonder how much they were actually used. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of one used in combat. That's not exactly proof they weren't used, but with most other weapons you can find action photos quite easily.

My impression (note!) is that there is actually some kind of multi-stage master plan. For instance, all the work done on the Italians means we will likely see them in North Africa (and probably in Russia too). It's simply too much effort and money to not reuse. So the late-war stuff comes first, likely followed (again, guessing) by mid-war at some point. Early war may never happen, There's also the fact that some modules, notably Stalingrad, require a lot of new terrain objects and possibly features so it kind of makes sense to do them later as the engine evolves. As for the modern line, I feel much less qualified to even guess at the master plan (if there even is one) but European or Asian (Korea gone hot?) scenarios seem like the logical odds-on favourites.

The late-war German organization beefed up on infantry firepower, partly to compensate for decreases in manpower. However that seems mostly to have meant more machineguns and mortars. The 1944 panzergrenadier TOE still shows the vast majority of soldiers with rifles, not submachineguns. There may well have been specific reasons for this, like problems with mass-producing German submachine gun designs or an increase in semi-auto rifles, but in any case it left the Russian infantry with a lot more automatic weapons just like you say. Since the Germans recognized the advantage of this early on my guess is cost or the continued delays to the ever-disappointing semi-auto rifles were behind it. Another factor may be that experienced units picked up a lot of unofficial automatic weapons just like Allied ones did. As for the Sturmgewehr, the panzer brigades were brand new units which may explain why they got the cool new weapons. Otherwise it seems the Sturmgewehrs may have gone to the infantry in the East since they needed them most, having a lot less firepower than armoured units as a whole. Someone did a pretty cool (if small) study of the combat effectiveness of the StGw by the way: http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=2549

I think there's a basic difference in that in Russia, Yugoslavia, and maybe some other places a lot of the partisans were stay-behind soldiers who went to the hills, swamps, and forests during the German invasion. For various reasons this did not happen the same way in Western Europe, meaning they had to start more from scratch. The size and geography of the Eastern front also meant there were much bigger inaccessible areas. Moscow sent a lot of cadres, often well trained and motivated Komsomol types, to the partisan forces which made them sort-of regular (shades of the VC and NVA in Vietnam). Still, the French resistance managed to get hold of a fair amount of arms and even if bigger operations like the Vercors republic failed they managed to cause a lot of nuisance. Footage from Paris in 1944 shows all-out urban warfare, and the amount of sniping and sabotage endured by German units travelling towards Normandy is also well documented. On top of that France was very important to the German war economy (more so than Russia), which meant ample opportunity for industrial sabotahe and espionage.

You mean resurrected as the improved CMNAO? :-)

The 1943 Sturmpz Abt TOE actually has three Pz III: http://www.sturmpanzer.com/Default.aspx?tabindex=2&tabid=302&item=1&sec=2 Seems they were never issued though, with the origin and tasks of the five Pz II in the abovementioned battalion being uncertain. Probably they were meant as recon, close protection and general runarounds just like the Pz III in the Tiger battallions.

So there's nothing official or semi-official then? Or at least semi-semi-official? I thought everyone dreamt of a 1980s scenario, but I guess I was projecting my own desires...

Whoa, that's quite a few! As has been pointed out in thread tanks are not collector's items, but just like the the rest of the military an instrument of state policy so losses have to be judged against the stakes in Syria for the Turks. Having said that, I'm sure there are tactical lessons to be applied. As far as I know the Turks have always been preparing for a conventional war against Greece, Russia, Syria, Iraq, and/or Iran so their equipment and tactics are in all likelihood geared towards that. The Leopard 2s, for example, were stationed in Western Turkey facing the Greeks and their similar tank force. Having so many potential enemies also means a big army where everything can't be top notch if you're a low or even middle-income country. Regarding tanks and AFVs specifically I'm wondering to what degree protection is optimized for kinetic threats compared to ATGMs. My guess is also that nice-to-have things like remote sensors and weapons stations are not available on most Turkish tanks due to the need to have such a big force.

There's a fair bit of information about the future of the WWII titles, but where does the modern line go from here? More Black Sea modules? 80s Cold War? Something else? Have there been any hints?

When looking at what makes soldiers fight (or not) junior leadership and small group bonding rank highest while political goals and ideology tend to rank last, with mid-and high level leadership and confidence in equipment falling somewhere in the middle. The Italian army was, like many others, class-based with the officers receiving better food etc. This was not good for morale, and I suspect the NCO class was also kind of weak while equipment was at best so-so. (One of the few positive aspects of national socialism from a military perspective was making the German army a bit more egalitarian. The clubby and snobbish nature of the officer class likely played a part in the morale collapse at the end of WWI, especially after the old school NCOs were all gone.) So while lack of enthusiasm for fascism and "Germany's war" probably played a role, especially after the US where masses of Italians had family entered the war, there were more immediate reasons for low Italian morale (even if they fought better than German blame-gamers give them credit for in Africa and Russia). The total Italian collapse after the invasion of mainland Italy may have something to do with seeing the war as lost, wrong and fought for a dubious ally though. There are some indications of plummeting German morale in the West in the last part of the war for the same reasons.