pintere

This is just a theory, but I wonder if the various persons in Russia are a lot more willing to go to Ukraine on the assumption that they’ll be employed in defensive rather than offensive operations? I know I’d way rather sit in a trench on same quiet patch of frontline as opposed to being crushed by the treads of my own armoured vehicles in the open…

Hmm I’ll keep that in mind next time my Pixeltruppen in CM flee TOWARDS the enemy when they clearly should’ve just stayed put. You know, this war has been a great showcase of how really stupid things can happen in modern warfare. And every time this is the case it becomes easier to forgive the mechanics of Combat Mission when it results in outcomes that seem either unrealistic/unfair.

Did that one Russian at the end (he had no weapon) really just run into the Legionnaires‘ trench and surrender? I didn’t see what happened to him after he hopped in.

Unfortunately Forczyk‘s third book does not tell us this… But the Germans did definitely suffer far greater losses than the Soviets in this phase, as not only the combat units but also all the support units would’ve been entirely lost.

You are correct, these numbers are for the city fight before Uranus only. And for good reason, as the overwhelming majority of German casualties during the Stalingrad battle were from the third phase, the natural consequence of an encircled force being destroyed completely.

And I would do it again! Quality missions deserve quality briefings.

Of course . It should be noted that I’m also very picky with the campaigns I keep for a long time. Ones that don’t make the cut include campaigns with insufficiently accurate uniforms/TOE (this excludes DragonWynn‘s Totenkopf and Finnish campaigns), requirements for mods that don’t come with mod tags (eg DragonWynn‘s Stalingrad campaign) or are duplicates of battles already portrayed in a higher quality campaign (such as the fanmade breakthrough to AG North campaign). Thankfully Frank‘s campaigns have none of these issues!

I might be a little late to the party, but I’d point you in the direction of Robert Forczyk‘s excellent 3 part series on the battle. At the end of book 2 (the one covering the city fighting), he reports that the Germans suffered 20,300 casualties within the city itself (including 4,600 dead/missing) in the time period 1 September — 20 November. Soviet losses are a lot harder to pin down. From September—November the Stalingrad Front suffered about 400,000 casualties, around half of which were dead/missing. Forczyk estimates that about a quarter of these losses were sustained in the city itself. So for the actual urban combat in Stalingrad from September to October, we have 20,300 German losses against ~100,000 Soviet losses. An approximate loss ratio of 5:1 in favour of the attacker, or 10:1 if only dead/missing are counted. I‘m beginning to get the impression that the actual city fight for Stalingrad was indeed a bloodbath, but clearly not a German one… At the very least it clearly shows that urban combat doesn’t necessarily produce higher losses for the attacking side.

Thanks to Frank I now have 16 campaigns to play on my version of Red Thunder. 5 by Battlefront, 5 by Frank, and 6 other fanmade campaigns. We are lucky there are so many good fanmade campaigns for Red Thunder. In fact, there may even be more for this game now than BN! Someone should do a count…

In this sense we can call this a positive development. The idea of the interview was probably to garner sympathy from US citizens to the Russian POV after all. This is just a theory, but I like to think that your average curious individual in the US would’ve started to watch this interview and then gotten so bored by Putin‘s history lesson that they stopped watching before the half hour mark.

Found a transcript for the Putin-Tucker interview: https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-tucker-carlson-podcast/vladimir-putin-ad58097b-f616-47d8-8bb8-1cbfe9aba16c Among the contents was this juicy nugget: Putin - "Before World War II, Poland collaborated with Hitler, and although it did not yield to Hitler's demands, it still participated in the petitioning of Czechoslovakia together with Hitler, as the Poles had not given the Danzig corridor to Germany and went too far, pushing Hitler to start World War II by attacking them. Why was it Poland against whom war started on first September, 1939? Poland turned out to be uncompromising, and Hitler had nothing to do but start implementing his plans with Poland."

Any chance there’s a transcript? I can’t even sit down and watch a GOOD two hour movie in one sitting these days, let alone a conversation between two of the most detestable living humans in the entire world.

It’ll be awesome to see the final product when it arrives! Congrats on completing such an ambitious project.

There’s no contradiction. Cutting off the infiltrated Russian troops (even wiping them out) wouldn’t change the overall trend. History is full of examples where local tactical victories (which I hope this turns out to be) failed to change the overall course of the battle.

Unfortunately I think it’s further confirmation Avdiivka will eventually be lost. It’s Bakhmut all over again, the Russian advance is slow, and their losses heavy, but they’re consistently gaining a little more ground day by day, and unless Ukraine launches counterattacks to retake lost ground (likely a costly strategy given their materiel inferiority) then the result is inevitable. It’s honestly painful to watch. The Ukrainians are fighting like lions to defend their country, but unfortunately we happen to live in a time where courage is about as important as the supply of 155mm artillery ammunition. And somehow North Korea is better at helping out the Russians in this way than Ukraine’s western allies…