Duckman

As a fellow Swede I feel I should chime in om Bergström. He is an amateur historian, albeit a well regarded one, and it shows sometimes. While his books are original and readable (possibly byproducts of him being an amateur) they are also quite full of sweeping, sometimes over the top statements and conclusions that a professional historian would avoid. For instance, in the Bulge book he claims that the Me 262 was "unquestionably the best fighter aircraft of the war" which is in fact a highly questionable statement (best in what way? etc). And this from a renowned aircraft historian! The Bulge book seems to latch onto a recent historical, and quite predictable, trend where Wacht am Rhein has gone from "close run thing", to "crazy and doomed Hitler project", and now back to "gamble but perhaps not impossible". This is of course the natural pendulum swing of revisionism and counter-revisionism, but Bergström doesn't seem to fully realize this and fails to contextualize it (a mistake a professional historian, for all his other potential faults, would not make). So is Bergström a Wehrmacht cultist? There are traces of it, probably unwittingly, but his Black Cross, Red Star books do not lean in direction (in fact they engage in some much-needed Luftwaffe myth busting) and I think he has probably just tagged along the revisionist train out of general excitement. Read his books for the original research and the wonderful photos, not as the last or most balanced word on the subject. (As for claims on general antiamericanism, I think that's mostly personal politics. The pro-Palestinian views he seems to espouse are very common in Sweden and especially, dare I say, among people of his generation. His criticism of the US Army in the book appears well sourced, if a bit unbalanced at times, and he's hardly the first author that has highlighted serious problems with e.g. the US Army's replacement system or Allied strategic decisions post-Normandy.)

They were really limited and could of course never replace AT guns. However much of the late war fighting was clearing town after town after town, and in those circumstances there will always be opportunities even for a raw recruit. The Russians took to plastering every cellar window, for good reason. It's somewhat comparable to today's conflicts, where the concrete landscape is as a force multiplier and gives amateur RPG shooters odds they would not enjoy in a more organized setting. Of course more skilled troops can make handheld weapons work in other environments as well, but it's more difficult.

Like others have said, almost all of the German stuff was new production which means there was less exotica than in Normandy. On the Allied side it was probably more varied since some units had e.g. 75 mm Shermans that were still running.

Omigawd! And Aachen too!

I think Niklas Zetterling and a few others killed off Prochorovka ten years ago. There's probably still some work to be done on the Soviet side, but there was enough in the German archives to bury it. I don't know where Kursk and Prochorovka currently sit in the pantheon of Great Tank Battles, but the leader is likely still Chinese Farm . Depending on how you count I imagine Desert Storm could perhaps stake a claim, but for sheer constriction it's hard to beat the Arab-Israeli wars. Goodwood may actually have been the biggest tank battle of WWII if you limit it to a reasonable definition of "single engagement", i.e. "battle" in a more old-fashioned and commonsensical way.

I also get the impression that they were.....perhaps not elite, but kind of special. They were supposed to go out there and win the battle with speed and dazzling maneuver. Of course reality turned out a bit different, but they still have some advantages compared to "mere" tankers and I like to think that stuff like better visibility and optics (?) are modelled in the game. I've probably had the most success with US TDs in semi-covered overwatch positions quite far back where they can use their long range skillz. If the enemy is doing something else you have a good chance of spotting first and getting side shots. A semi-concealed position that lets you shoot through a gap between trees, the saddle of a hill, or something like that is good.

December 16th of course.

Ok. Thanks for the reply.

Ok, getting an error message now (it took a while):

Not a lot of action in here, but I'll give it a shot: I just developed an interest in this game, a little but late you could say, and figured it would be a nice laptop game. I have an Asus Ultrabook running Win 10. Tried downloading the demo to see if it would run, and it installed fine but will not start. No messages or anything either. What's the deal? Is it just a demo issue, or is the game pre-Vista?

True, although the urban density of Western and Central Europe almost has to be seen to be believed (I assume it surprises even many Americans) and has dictated military strategy for centuries.. You do feel for the poor Western Allies who had to slog through that. If you factor in rivers, woods, canals, and other obstacles as well there is probably a potential defensive position every 500 metres or so. No wonder the Ardennes was such an attractive idea. Definitely. You also have big urban battles like Aachen and Cherbourg on the Western Front. Didn't he even say it almost killed them? As for the Romanians, there is an interesting clue in that they included the Renault R35 in Fortress Italy. While the Italians did use about 125 of them, it was one of the main tanks of the Romanian army (along with the Skoda tanks) for a lot of the war. So while the R35 most obviously points to France 1940, it could also point to the Romanians (at least if one indulges a little wishful thinking). The Eastern Axis minors didn't really have that much unique heavy equipment. They mostly used the Skoda tanks, also used by the Germans as Pz 35 and 38(t) of course and necessary for Barbarossa, and after that second-hand Pz III/IV and StuGs. The only really unique vehicles were the Hungarian Toldi and some tank destroyer conversions similar to the Marder. The R35 and the L3 tankette (used by Hungary and Bulgaria) are already in Fortress Italy.

As a huge Axis minors fan I would love Romania, but I think that will be a bit too much (and perhaps not marketable enough) for a module. The Romanians had different uniforms and a lot of unique equipment, so they would require quite a bit of work. I think Bagration as well pretty much followed from Normandy. I doubt they would have chosen that battle as the first Eastern module otherwise. It's probably a case of another late-war East Front base game not being commercially viable, as opposed to the very marketable Bulge. I'd absolutely love Hungary as well (see above), but as for Berlin (or any other big city battle, e.g. Budapest or Aachen) I don't think that's doable without a major engine update focused on the features required to support that. Think ASL with its umpteen kinds of rubble and burned out buildings. The only battle I see that could support that kind of investment would be Stalingrad. I'm reading Robert Forczyk's Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-42 right now and the Barbarossa battles certainly can make for a good game. Operationally and strategically the Russians didn't have much of a chance, mainly because of command and logistics issues, but tactically it was a lot more even and you have plenty of battles where small-gunned panzers and panzerjägers faced T-34s and KVs, and human player could of course make matchups like the T-26 vs Pz 35(t) or Pz III a lot more even than they were historically. And for a Barbarossa game there is of course a logical module in the battle of Moscow, one of the most famous and decisive battles in world history.

What I find intriguing is that there is no obvious candidate for a Red Thunder module. This is unlike e.g. Kursk where Korsun would be the odds-on favourite, Barbarossa where you have the battle of Moscow, or 1942 where you have the endgame in Stalingrad including the relief effort as well as Manstein's counterattack. So far the modules have also been rather famous battles, like Market-Garden and the Gustav Line (Cassino). Of course you could argue that Bagration itself isn't very well known outside history buff circles, making it a mute point... We'll see, I guess. Would love a bone though. :-)

Ok, that takes Korsun out of the picture then. Hopefully it shows up at a later date since there is potential for some really good scenarios and campaigns. The Luftwaffe field divisions were turned over to the Heer in 1943, and thenceforth known as Feld-Divisionen (L). From browsing the list here: http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Gliederungen/FelddivisionenL/Gliederung.htm it seems a lot of them were in Kurland, and besides they were technically Heer troops by then, The Fallschirmjäger were never a big presence in the East (in 1944 they went to France, Holland and then the Ruhr pocket), so my money goes to (drumroll) Poland/Vistula and the Hermann Göring parapanzers!

The now-locked road map thread had a little info about the future in the East: We will also soon start work on the first Module for Red Thunder. The details of this are a little fuzzy at present, though it is safe to say that it will be packed full of fun. Think winter combat and the inclusion of Waffen SS and LW forces not seen in Red Thunder. Anyone want to guess scenarios? Korsun seems to fit the bill (well known, plenty of SS), with the only problems being that it would mean going backwards from Bagration and that I can't find any Luftwaffe units in the OOB. It mostly lists divisions though, so there may have been some smaller units. Winter battles after Bagration include the Baltic offensive, which is quite interesting as well as under-represented but also seems to lack Luftwaffers and has troublesome (from a game perspective) Estonians. We also have the Budapest offensive, which again has Axis minors. Finally there are the battles in Poland in autumn and winter 1944/45, which feature the high-profile Hermann Göring division among others (and plenty of SS). Guesses? Preferences? More candidates?

Ditto on formations, it would make larger battles more manageable. My main wish would be more work on cover and concealment. I'd love good looking foxholes of different types, camouflaged AT guns, tanks in haystacks.....that kind of stuff.

Time for a broom mod? Zaloga is excellent, as always. A proper historian, using a proper historian's tools, putting the Panzer Myth in perspective. A lot of it really comes down to who writes books and not.

I've read Zetterling and Koschorrek. Both are good, but they are totally different genres which makes it hard to recommend one over the other. Koschorrek is a grunt memoir, with not much combat but what appears to be honest and not overly redacted recollections. Some of the characters are quite interesting, e.g. the religious guy in his unit that doesn't want to kill (and in the end gets killed). There is also blatant fraternizing. Zetterling is a rather dry operational study, with lots of mythbusting and statistics just like in his books on Normandy and Kursk. There are some personal narratives sprinkled throughout, but they're more flavouring than main course.

Hahaha, too accurate! It's funny how lost causing seems to be a basic and unchanging trait of human psychology.I bet there were propagandists crying over the great lost cause and missed opportunities of Chieftain Mighty Nosebone in 5000 BC. The Waterloo griping, fingerpointing and plain fantasising started right after the battle (or perhaps even while it was still in progress), with memorable inventions like Victor Hugo's "ravine" (acrually a small roadside ditch) that caused the French cavalry attacks to fail. Then of course there is always Ney and Grouchy. On the Allied side we have the great Anglo-German glory stealing and coverup, as chronicled by Peter Hofschröer in his books. La Belle Alliance was anything but.

Good posts. The German fall in quality from Normandy to the Bulge was pronounced, caused by the replacement machine finally not being able to keep up after the double blows of Summer 44. When you read accounts from Normandy German small unit tactics are widely praised, and often seen as superior (this was of course exacerbated by Allied inexperience in quite a few cases). However in the Bulge there seems to be a general consensus that German small unit tactics were generally poor (frontal assault instead of infiltration, etc), which is quite the opposite to Normandy were good small unit performance could often save poor tactical and even operational situations (e.g. Caen). Allied units had also picked up more automatic weapons, some via TOE and others unofficially, which helped close the infantry firepower gap you sometimes get in Normandy accounts. Ideally this will show in the game, with veteran units having more stuff.

It of course depends on what you mean by irrelevant, but I agree that after Barbarossa failed it was basically pick your poison for Germany. Any scenario where they win the war after December 1941 is of the banana peel variety. In poker terms you could say that Germany had two possible "outs" (ways to win): a negotiated peace after the Fall of France, and a military victory (most likely requiring a Soviet political collapse) during Barbarossa. After that the element of strategic surprise is gone, and the force levels are simply not there. It's interesting that the Allies had far more outs, i.e. ways to win before 1945, but they don't get discussed nearly as much as the German what-ifs. If the events surrounding the Italian surrender or the Hungarian near-defection had been more fortunate (and the German response less energetic) it might have shortened the war substantially, for example. The same can be said if the Soviets had managed to encircle Army Group A in the Caucasus in late 1942 (they came close), if the strategic bombing campaign had targeted German fuel production earlier, or (perhaps most tantalizingly) if the invasion of France had happened in 1943 as the Americans wanted. Lots of quite realistic possibilities there.

Can you at least drop a hint for those of us not privy to the secret handshake? Ditto on both. While CM has far less Borg spotting than other games it still has better C3 than Reality , and especially compared to the WWII variety where communication was often via runners and broken down radios, using maps that were not exactly state of the art. The effect is that we still can coordinate fires much better than a real WWII commander.

This is from British Lend-Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941 - June 1942 by Alexander Hill, published in The Journal of Military History, Volume 71, Number 3, July 2007:

Early war Lend-Lease is still a bit of touchy and underexplored subject. British Lend-Lease tanks were present in significant numbers during the battle of Moscow, for example.

You have a point, but I think the other advantages the player has compared to a real commander (God view, better C3, etc) balances that out.