kensal

Turn 20 completed Unfortunately flanking fire hits them from their left hand side The lead elements break back, as follow up elements move forward into the cross-fire, four casualties. The Germans in the flanking position are in a mini-fortress of buildings, walls and hedges which cannot easily be approached except via the southernmost east-west parallel road running through Buron. 10 Platoon cannot therefore effectively engage these emplacement and so 9 platoon, on the other side of the east west parallel road, are going to have to swing north and try to engage the enemy from the rear, to winkle them out.

Turn 20 completed 10 Platoon's firefight - lead elements reach a hedge line as the Germans reach their trenches

Turn 20 completed A Coy continues moving into west Buron atm unopposed Battalion mortars begin hitting central Buron In the bottom of this image you can see 10 Platoon, D Coy, moving towards a German entrenchment, at the same time as the Germans seek to re-occupy it. A short sharp firefight ensues

Well the German question was often "How can we build a tank weighing 1,000 tonnes powered by u boat engines or an 80cm railway gun with a crew of 250 men to assemble it, 2,500 men to lay the railway tracks and which needs two flak battalions to protect it"

Thanks for the reference to the book - I wasn't aware of this.

This is pretty much exactly what I was driving at - that the focus on the relative effectiveness of individual units, while interesting academically, misses the broader point about the importance of logistics, replacements and economic support. I find it very difficult to reconcile some authors' view that the German army was the most professional army of the modern era when you look at the fact that it was, for the most part, horse-drawn, relied extensively on captured weapons and partly on captured soldiers, and was unable to supply itself satisfactorily in pretty much every campaign it engaged in. I have read part of the Dupuy Institute's Capture Rate study (which led to me writing the OP) which follows on from Dupuy's original work on this subject (it is fairly indigestible in parts being based on detailed data) and the broad conclusion from the various engagements used for those studies in Italy and the Ardennes was that in the ETO the Americans and the German forces were broadly equally effective, with perhaps the German forces being slightly more effective man for man and the British forces slightly behind them both (but note that the two main British divisions involved in the Italian engagements mentioned in the study were considered possibly to be not representative of all British units - they had previously been given combat effectiveness values lower than average for British units, so that the conclusion on British effectiveness was tentative). I was also specifically not including the Soviet armies in my OP.

Personally I think the Germans were doomed the moment the started Barbarossa - their assessment of the military and economic capacity of the USSR was wholly inaccurate.

I have been reading a lot about the relative effectiveness of the allies and German forces in the European theatre in WWII recently. There is a valid debate on this subject. Trying to be objective it sometimes appears to me that differing viewpoints sometimes appear to be addressing different issues. There are historians that emphasise or even champion the effectiveness of each army in this theatre. The question in this thread is whether there is really any actual disagreement between them. In the final analysis, the ETO witnessed catastrophic defeats of the German army. Why did this happen? One school of thought is that the German army was outnumbered and outgunned. A revisionist school of thought is that the allied armies won not because of these factors but rather because of the relative effectiveness of its units compared to the units they were facing. It seems to me that this debate is asking the wrong question. The question is, in relation to the relative competency of each country's armed forces, is what was the eventual outcome of each particular campaign or engagement. The purpose of a campaign or engagement is to defeat or destroy the enemy and how that happens is a secondary and ultimately irrelevant question when one is determining success or failure on the battlefield. The point I am slowly coming to is that the issue of whether, man for man, or even unit for unit, the German or the US or the UK armies were more effective does not answer the question as to which army was more effective - that question is unequivocally answered by the results of the campaigns in question. I am sure that in different small unit, battalion, division and corps engagements it is possible to find that different countries' soldiers performed more or less effectively than their opposition. The variables in each case are so widespread that it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the relative effectiveness about different countries' soldiers and perhaps it is pointless trying to do this. What we can say confidently is that in campaign terms the allies consistently beat the Germans from 1942 onwards in the ETO. That may reflect numbers and logistics as much as any other factor but in reality the detailed reasons for that do not disguise the fact that the allied armies were more effective than the German armies during this period. From the perspective of the theory of war, for example as posited by Sun Tzu or von Clausewitz there was only one winner. In each case the allies engaged the Germans in circumstances which enabled decisive allied victories and in that respect it is difficult to argue cogently that the German armed forces were better than the allied armed forces.

Turn 19 completed Btn mortars are now getting ranged in on the main German positions in the centre of Buron. The suspected AT gun position is just to the right of the small stone building mid map Finally a situation map

Turn 19 completed: A Coy - the view from West Buron - a further platoon is following up the lead platoon's success A Coy looking up the road and into the gardens of West Buron

Turn 19 completed More Germans troops arriving, facing D Coy, perhaps to re-establish a defensive line

Turn 19 completed 20 minutes and we have made good progress. This is my last report until the end of August as I am off for a couple of weeks in the pyrenees en famille. Will miss this though ! Here, the wretched detritus of war

He does, but I do not get the sense yet that he is deploying with that in mind. My intention is to prevent it. I must of course clear Buron totally within the hour. Alternatively if he takes more than 50% casualties and still has troops on the board, those troops are deemed to have retreated and I take the hex on the PzC board. I am unclear as to whether, in that event, if those troops are effectively encircled on the board, they still retreat or are deemed to have surrendered.

Turn 17 completed A Coy continue moving up the north -south road into west Buron, unhindered. The lead elements are a couple of minutes from seizing west Buron. A Coy has moved 3 platoon to exploit this penetration, with a view to establishing a strong presence there This aerial shot shows how close they are to cutting off the western escape route for Richter's men

Turn 17 completed Unfortunately one of B Coy's sections moves up into the firing line of the PAK in central Buron and three men are hit

Turn 17 completed And the Stuart don't miss taking out four or five of them D Coy witness the carnage

Turn 17 completed I have not been counting casualties but my estimate of our casualties thus far are: A Coy: possibly 12-13, (5 of which were friendly fire) B Coy: possibly 6 C Coy: possibly 8-9, (2 of which I suspect were friendly fire) D Coy: possibly just 1 (friendly fire again) On the southernmost edge of Buron, D Coy moves cautiously forward. D Coy's two southernmost platoons have both moved a long distance in the last quarter of an hour so part of the reason for moving relatively slowly at this point is to give them breather Along the first east - west parallel road, the two German sections opposing C Coy suffer badly. The four on the other side of the hedge from the Stuart are cut down one by one. The six or so facing C Coy (and who took out 4 of our guys) break from the fire from C Coy and from fire coming from their rear, from D Coy's northernmost platoon They flee across the front of D Coy's northernmost platoon, but despite several troops taking pot shots at them, they escape unscathed However they are also running across the Stuart's firing line

Turn 17 completed D Coy continues to make serene progress through East Buron

Turn 17 completed Enemy infantry facing the Stuarts in central Buron retreat at last. They stuck it for 3 or 4 turns, so we must have got some of them with 3 tanks raking the hedge line C Coy advances down the first parallel towards central Buron and into trouble with the first four man party being cut down on the road. A vicious firefight develops A stuart takes down two Germans at point blank range These two German sections could be in trouble now. They are facing heavy fire from the front. D Coy's nearest platoon is about to hit them from behind.

Turn 17 completed. A Coy is now making rapid progress south into west Buron. Seems like nobody else is at home in this part of the village.

Can't we ask GAJ to modify the H2HH to add this crucial feature?

Turn 16 completed D Coy views the way forward through the orchards, keeping contact with C Coy's left flank One of that platoon's section leaders cops a fragment from a 37mm shot by one of the supporting stuart's ... doh. Further south, D Coy's middle platoon moves through gardens, buildings and orchards on the southern side of Buron, meeting no opposition

Turn 16 completed C Coy continues working forward down the first east -west parallel road German infantry seek to escape encirclement through the gardens, pursued by small arms fire

Turn 16 completed On C Coy's front, scouts detect a 50mm AT gun defending Central Buron. The gun takes down one of the scouts

Turn 16 completed: The last man standing surrenders just in time Meanwhile, on the far western flank, A Coy's scouts advance towards their objective, without response. Can it be undefended !?