SimpleSimon

This is a pretty interesting point Doug and one i'll consider from now on when I read. The Americans had major problems trying to tank-their-way through the Hurtgen in October, a blunder for which American media was conspicuously silent on, other than the usual complaints by American Generals that Montgomery took too long clearing the Scheldt. In such context Montgomery was an easy scapegoat. Perhaps if the Americans had been on the North wing of the advance the Scheldt would've been cleared in September. Then in the south the British would've paused to study and prepare themselves for an offensive through the Hurtgen Forest with greater prudence and finesse rather than trying to cram several Armored Divisions and way, way too many of those garbage Combat Commands through one of Europe's most dense forests. The Hurtgen was asking for a Meuse-Argonne style solution, not another Operation Cobra...

I'm not so sure. The basic job of recon is to screen a larger formation coming up the roads behind them. Fighting is either a secondary job or maybe just as important as the first task depending on the Army or maybe even branch of that Army. I think what we really need to do is consider objectives and context differently for recce troops than for mainline infantry. The scenario designers have a tendency to view everything from the perspective of a pitched set-piece battle I think, and this colors their approach to objectives and scoring. There is a tendency to sell the CMx2 engine short for depicting things like recon, but honestly I think the problem here is well, us. A lack of imagination and a lack of knowledge unfortunately. A few scenarios in the games exist depicting reconnaissance well enough but they are a minority. Component reconnaissance formations of Armies all behaved differently though and there were different expectations placed on all of them too. Most Armies had light recon consisting of motorcycles, cars, or horses. Plenty of them had no movers at all for the men assigned these duties, and consequently those kinds of scouts would not operate very far beyond their main body and would not be expected to accomplish much other than verifying that the fields and roads beyond were not certain death. Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, those lavishly well equipped and heavily armed Panzer Aufklarung which had half tracks and scout cars with guns up to 75mm equipped. They could kill tanks if they ambush them! The Americans fully expected their own recce groups to intercept the enemy's recce and armed them with that mission in mind. (M8 Greyhound, the Staghound too though they never used it) Hopefully they'd destroy them but at the very least they'd restrict their movements and ability to see ahead and gather information on what the Panzer or Motorized Division behind them was charging up toward. In general recon's job was to avoid pitched engagements....they lacked the weight and punch for lots of fighting...but they were often sharp enough to fight short engagements and perhaps win some of those too.

The invasion of France was full of risks, but no single one of them could defeat the invasion by itself. Operation Overlord was full of risks, but no single setback or defeat would cause the invasion to fail. Market Garden had a crippling design flaw that risked making the entire assault moot if literally just this one thing happened that always happens which was the Germans blowing up a bridge in imminent danger of capture. How could they make this plan around the hope that this would be the one time they failed to do that? This was a plan that created far more questions than it answered and that's just what tends to emerge out of a bad plan. Market Garden was an unfortunate example of something that can emerge from the kind of large and complicated bureaucracy of the Allied war effort. It's not something that people limited to military experience encounter in their daily lives. If you've ever worked for a Corporation or just about any multi-level organization there has most certainly been a "Market Garden" at your place of work and if you stick around long enough there's certain to be another. An operation, directive, initiative, etc thought up at high levels (ie: management) and then passed down to subordinates fully cognizant that it was either out-of-touch with reality or foolish. The solution is good communication between the various levels of management and staff and minimal insulation between those levels so accountability for both success and failure can be distributed appropriately. Criticism makes people uncomfortable and can be painful but it is part of the process of learning and while it's also important to be fair sometimes you can't have both. Montgomery is fortunate that all he ever faced for the debacle on the Nederrijn was criticism. Men under his command faced things far worse.

Yes, the staff work was excellent which gives Montgomery no excuse whatsoever for giving the go-ahead for an Operation which made no provision for capture of its most important objectives on the first day of operations.... There were many basic flaws with Market Garden to varying degrees some of which could simply be attributable to egos, wounded or otherwise, among military men. Many of these flaws (some virtues too) were picked up by politics during and after the war to color the operation in all sorts of ways to fit a someone's personal agenda. So i'm not going to address those issues like sending an entire Corp up a single highway and landing an entire Division of Airborne troops in a region of the Netherlands covered by some of the heaviest anti-aircraft arrangements in Europe (the landing zones were on the route the RAF and 8th Air Force used to bomb the Ruhr) not to mention marooning lightly armed Airborne Divisions uncomfortably close to a Waffen SS Panzer training center. All of these issues were discovered in the planning phase by Monty's staff by the way, i'm not making them up. The Dutch Officer schools would automatically fail any cadet who proposed attacking Holland up the Eindhoven-Arnhem roadway, it was literally the worst answer you could give on a staff exam. No, the biggest issue of them all with the plan was that no provision whatsoever was made to actually capture the Nijmegan rail bridge. If the Germans blew the rail bridge up the entire operation would automatically fail. That they didn't end up doing this (for reasons no one has been able to explain) is not a testament to Montgomery's leadership since he couldn't possibly have known the Germans (ie: General Model) would fail to destroy the bridge and give the operation its only (slim) chance of success whatsoever. I won't address then what would happen if the Operation had been successful because that's all just counterfactual history at that point. It was foolishly reckless and this was known before the Operation commenced.

The Stummel was about as typical as Assault Guns got and that was a category of weapon system many Armies found extremely useful. It's just crucial that you know what you're using it for and against what. It's easy to accuse the Stummel of many things that it certainly was with its limited traversing and weak Stuk L/24 gun mounted on a vulnerable half-track chassis without so much as a machine gun. Why then did so many vehicles like it exist nonetheless? The SU-76 was also an open top gun carrier that the Soviets built the hell out of so why build so many examples of an ostensibly inferior AFV? It's because like MikeyD says, it wasn't a tank, it's a gun carrier. It's a way to get the infantry the StuK L/24 gun fighting right alongside them and as a bonus, the weapon's crew is even protected from basic return fire such as a mortars, rifles and machine guns. This is a job that the far superior Sturmgeshutz used to perform but unfortunately because the StuG was so superb it was frequently held at higher levels for more important tasks. In the Red Army the SU-76's job was originally assigned to light tanks like the T-70...but the Red Army ended up deeply unsatisfied with the performance of light tanks. They were too expensive and demanding on logistics for which the return was the unimpressive firepower of their light guns. So they got rid of the turret and duct taped a ZiS-3 to the chassis. That's just the nature of the war's economy-of-force rules lol.

A rule-of-thumb is that If your map presents no options for either of the sides to simply outmaneuver each other and achieve anything via bypass, then it is a set-piece battle. Another good rule-of-thumb is that it's much easier to make a hard scenario than an easy one. Start small and learn from that before going big. Crucially modern Armies are much smaller than they were in 1945 and frontlines are highly abstract concepts now. Infrastructure is also much improved now and effectively every formation is performing a screening mission to one degree or another. The average range an infantry squad can decisively affect a firefight is only around 200 meters but they have weapons that can be effective much further out than that. A pair of M240s will make an 800-700 meter range around their position extremely dangerous to transit while within about 400m or so they will shut down movement entirely of a platoon sized force. The capabilities of the average infantry GPMG are what I personally "peg the value" of my map selection and design at.

+ 1 Barbarossa. The world will hold its breath and make no comment...

I think North Africa would also be the first module to require on-map depictions of field artillery and Allied anti-aircraft guns too. The 25pdr and French 75' frequently ended up being used as anti-tank guns since the 6pdr wasn't available in quantity until the end of 1942. Much like the East, the frontline in North Africa was highly permeable, and frequently artillery positions ended up in the fighting since there might be nothing other than a thin line of infantry between them and the enemy. Perhaps no one at all. Beevor's books are quite good and in fact he's one of my sources. You are correct too, Beevor asserts that Market Garden was all Montgomery. Mind you, Beevor is right that the operational plan was all Montgomery, but the basic directive to "end the war by Christmas" by attacking (ie: liberating) the Netherlands sounds like a plan hatched at a level far above Montgomery's pay grade. Beevor himself pointed out in Second World War that the Prime Minister was frequently at odds with Alan Brooke and the rest of the IGS. Churchill had a tendency to meddle in operational decisions and plans that were explicitly not his responsibility and Alan Brooke was only just able to talk him out of a number of misguided adventures during the war. Since the man was his boss Brooke had to give way sometimes and unfortunately I think one of the times he chose to give way was over a decision taken by the Prime Minister-formally or informally-to pre-empt the Americans and restore British honor by through an invasion of Germany through the Ruhr. The problem with the plan for attacking Germany through Holland is to me, too obvious for an experienced military man like Montgomery, whatever one thinks of him, for it to had been his idea. An attack calling for a rapid advance through German held Holland then turning into a complicated southward pivot into the Ruhr before winter set in just doesn't sound like something any General worth his salt would've considered easy, or maybe even sane. It sounds like something a...well, a politician would think up, a layperson. Think about some of the other circumstances that would've made it appealing from Churchill's perspective, like the prospect of liberating the Dutch and restoring Queen Wilhelmina's government or closing down the German V1 and V2 bases in Holland. Montgomery never would've considered vetoing it, the chance at capturing the Ruhr before November and opening the path to Berlin in an audacious operation thought up entirely by His Majesty's Finest while the Americans were busy shooting up trees in the Hurtgen? All of these rewards and promises in one plan and if it's successful Britain gets to own every single one of them. The specific Operational plan though? That was all Montgomery, and as Beevor highlights there were many, many problems with it.

A blunder foisted on him quite a bit by London. This is what annoys me about the pop history since the effort to make Montgomery out to be the 2nd coming of Wellington is just as wrong as the efforts to depict him is a bloody moron. Market Garden came down from London, and while the details of the operation were worked out by Montgomery the operation was in fact the detritus of Churchill's administration, one the Imperial General Staff couldn't contain this time, so Monty had to work with it and unfortunately he did make things worse. It didn't really all start with him though. Unfortunately it seems Wavell and Auchinleck fell afoul of the Prime Minister, a surefire way to get sacked or sent to India. Yet Churchill wasn't entirely wrong here, men in Auchinleck's command like Neil Ritchie were highly questionable leaders and Churchill was tired of wondering when the next aide was going to inform him of more bad news from the Middle East. Bonus awkward if he's in the middle of lunch with Roosevelt. Auchinleck was retreating again? Victory is in the other direction! So he did what any leader would do, he took action and had Auchinleck removed. Originally he was going to send General Gott but Gott's plane was shot down so instead command went to Montgomery, a man very adept at playing to Churchill's desires and concerns but this proved a rather important talent didn't it? Auchinleck and Wavell didn't seem like heroes to the media which was unfortunate since they were actually good tacticians. Auchinleck came off as a stuffy British Elite while the stubborn roughneck Wavell had too many enemies in the Imperial General Staff and had taken the fall for the disaster in Greece (which he didn't want any part of to begin with). Ironically Rommel thought highly of both, but a war waged on public consent needed at least some men who could parlay with the media successfully since public opinion mattered so much. I can think of nations that were fighting the war with zero consideration of public consent, I wouldn't want to have lived in any of them much less fought for them. Indeed. Something these guys had to deal with was being constantly being overruled or second guessed by Washington, London, and Moscow. Sound strategies were ruined all the time by politics, but that's because the Grand Alliance was the most important strategy of them all and Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin knew it.

How did he put up with Patton assaulting an American servicemen or Bradley's childish temper tantrums all the time? He was mindful of the fact he was the boss of all these men and that he had to be responsible for his staff, which meant among many things that he had to be fair. Montgomery was an arrogant egomaniac but can you find a General for me in all of history who wasn't? Compared to the equally boisterous qualities of many of his equally famous peers Montgomery was not all that much worse in either the social or professional sense. The Press was a major factor back in 1940 and you had to factor it in since the war effort was a taxpayer funded thing directed by civilian governments in London and Washington. Montgomery pandered shamelessly to inflate his importance to be sure but plenty of his stardom was in fact promoted by Churchill who was rather well known for demanding his Generals prioritize the British Empire's prestige over sound strategy. Montgomery was the media's poster child for British Generalship during the war but for good reason. He was reassuring, charming, and confident and that counted for quite a lot, not only to the press but also to subordinate staff looking for their boss to set an example. He was a star baby, no less than the other big actors trying to grab the spotlight of the war, MacArthur, Patton, Bradley, Clark, yes even the German Generals Rommel, Guderian, Manstein etc. These guys didn't become Generals for being modest that's for sure. Which is a shame because in fact the best Generals on both sides of the war are frequently the ones you didn't hear all that much about. Eisenhower could only underline the value of guys like Simpson, Patch, Gerow, Truscott in a report while the war was winding down while i'm not sure the British even thanked Auchinleck or Wavell or Leese. Today's pop media has done very little to deflate the drama around any of the war's biggest personalities like Patton or Montgomery, in some ways its made things worse by asking honestly silly questions like "who's strategy was better" when strategy wasn't up to them. EDIT: To add, probably the angriest Eisenhower ever got was over the recalcitrance of an Admiral who wasn't even under his command, French Admiral Jean Darlan and his foot dragging over surrendering Vichy North Africa. Poor Ike actually yelled that he "needed a good assassin" at one point openly to his staff while smoking whole packs of Camels from the isolation of Gibraltar while what seemed like Darlan's ego was putting the entire invasion at risk. In the end ironically Darlan was assassinated but the crisis had passed by then. This event was not a proud moment for the Supreme Allied Commander who appeared to have lost his nerve, but such was the nature of the Invasion of North Africa that the Americans were totally new at all of this and there were problems top-to-bottom. Even Eisenhower had things to learn after all...

That narrative makes it sound like the British cheated because they had more stuff so the Germans could console themselves that they never stood a chance. Rommel was warned by OKH that if he pursued the British into Egypt he would not be resupplied. There was no uncertainty about this warning, he would get nothing because there would be no way to reach him in Egypt. He literally chased the British right back into their own supply dumps on "his own initiative" when it was already very problematic to keep his Army supplied from Tripoli. By chasing the British into Egypt he signed a death warrant for the huge number of Italian troops in his command that he marooned there after leaving his umbilical cord several hundred miles to his rear. Marooning your Army behind enemy lines is not sound strategy, confronting a cautious enemy commanding superior defensive ground and supported considerably by artillery and air support was both unsound and not even doctrinal for the Wehrmacht. Rommel was showboating that's all, he wanted to convince Hitler to personally intervene on his behalf and direct supplies to the Afrika Korp over the protestations of the OKH and the meddling of the Commando Supremo and Kesselring. Incidentally Kesselring was not in fact trying to sabotage him, but he did earn Mussolini's (useless) advocacy of his priority in the supply chain. None of this highlights anything the British did during either battle as particularly clever, but they were rather more prudent and it was a good time to be that way since the British had just suffered a string of emotional and actual setbacks that year. First Singapore fell, then that summer the Gazala line collapsed and Tobruk was lost after its heroic defense had been the headline of the year before. Case Blau commenced in Russia and seemed as if the Soviet Union might lose the war after all. Against this Claude Auchinleck was facing major morale problems in 8th Army (some of which were by his own making), another major defeat for the British that year would be devastating so he kept the retreat going right on through Mersa Matruh. History has obscured how unpopular a decision this was at the time, El Alamein was much closer to Cairo, and the Luftwaffe would be in range of Alexandria but Auchinleck realized that 8th Army's morale was close to breaking and suffering another major defeat would be devastating. Stabilizing the front was the most important thing and he couldn't rely on willpower for that, so he had the Qattara Depression arrange it for him. Even if catastrophe struck and Rommel somehow managed to collapse the line, he couldn't bypass the 8th Army since the force-to-space ratio was so dense. There would be fighting all the way to Alexandria no matter what. The British were thinking strategically while Rommel wasn't. The narrative of a successful offensive via bludgeoning is ironically one also sold by the British themselves, who wanted to make it sound as if it had been Montgomery's plan all along. Ah ha! I meant to order 7th Armored Brigade into a suicide charge against that Flak battery you see! He certainly could not claim he had been a superior leader to Auchinleck on the grounds that he had been a better tactician that's for sure.

We're just thinking about all those times the British charged strong defensive positions head on because of London. That didn't stop happening after 1943 though and we didn't skip or fail to enjoy the Market Garden and Final Blitz modules despite the fact that they depicted losing battles predominantly. El Alamein wasn't even a defeat for the British, it was a resounding victory albeit a highly frustrating one. It was really one of the war's most classic set-piece battles that in fact played into the British Army's strengths more than people realize. An artillery-infantry battle aiming to reduce a fortified enemy position head-on, something the British proved themselves rather good at. So I just don't understand where all the pessimistic descriptions of it arise from. The Crusader's problem was that it was rushed into serial production after France because the British Army had its More-Tanks-Right-Now mentality. Who could've known how empty a threat Sea-Lion was? The plan after that was always to grab the Grant and Sherman tanks but neither of them were ready before the Crusader was, and the Crusader was better than nothing even though British commanders were well aware of its many undesirable features like lack of a commander's cupola, light main armament, faulty cooling system, and dangerous open rack stowage of its ammunition. Plenty of German and Italian tanks couldn't match it, and Rommel never really had all that many Mk IIIs and IVs.

What are the development tools and/or SDKs that Battlefront makes use of if they're willing to say? No promises, but if I had some knowledge of what's involved i'd look into volunteer work. I can't code but years ago I managed to figure out 3DS Max well enough.

Probably also why we won't be seeing a CM: Afghanistan HD anytime soon either.

I have wondered why it hasn't happened myself. Between Fortress Italy and Shock Force 2 there's plenty of useful terrain meshes, textures, and buildings to do a convincing North Africa. You've got what you need to model the desert from the Atlas Mountains to El Alamein or even Casablanca. Even small amounts of model work seems to be quite challenging though, and you'd need things like Italian tanks, French hardware, on-map field guns, and early-war German and Allied tanks that are not yet present in the engine.

Yes, play enough and you will see this. I just lost a StuG III to a 122mm round that crashed through its roof testing a scenario I made yesterday.

You basically have this feature with Target Reference Points, issue is that scenario designers often don't give any to the player when he's attacking even though offense is the most crucial time for them.

It's more challenging to learn, a bit unwieldy even after you do but I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. They're constantly revising the smart-order mechanics to decrease the micro. Graviteam's stuff is another option on the Operation scale and a good one, but if you've got patience so is Steel Division 2.

Studienka in Red Thunder is practically a campaign in a single mission. It's a huge confrontation but the counts are small enough and the terrain varied enough on both sides that it won't necessarily degenerate into a set-piece battle.

http://themaginotline.info/index.php http://www.jarrelook.co.uk/Urbex/Ouvrage Mont des Welches/Mont_des_Welches.htm Here's a good pair of websites with lots of pictures and information about the peer French fortification on the border, the Maginot Line. It's apparent to me after a little bit a study that the Maginot Line was much superior at its intended job to the Westwall, and presented a serious obstacle to an attacker. More of its bunkers were partially or fully buried. Many of them made use of cast turrets and such with excellent ballistic qualities. Interestingly, most of the Maginot Line's bunkers had their buried segments facing toward Germany (a machine gun would often be the only weapon to cover this arc). This is the because the bunkers were designed to watch over minefields, obstacles, and guard posts on the ground between them as well to cover each other with enfilading fire. Substantial support facilities are buried underground with the bunkers as well like kitchens, surgery wards, air scrubbers etc. They are designed to hold out even if cut off and would've had substantial self-sufficiency for this.

A new game engine would require abandonment of most of CMx2's content though. I can't see myself making the leap to a new game engine until its menu of sides, equipment, ToEs, units, maps, etc was suitably large enough for my militaria ADD. I think the CMx2 engine is more than adequate for the foreseeable future personally, and most of what i'd like to see on the technical side are relatively minor quality-of-life and user-interfacing improvements that I can do without. The first thing that will keep me buying modules and games is further exploration of sides, theatres, wars, etc that have not been covered so far ie: the Battle of France, Cold War, Barbarossa and accompanying modules for all of that. Don't get me wrong, a new engine would be great if it would facilitate faster development and release of content and enable greater options in what Battlefront could explore with the series.

It honestly does to me. I was rather impressed by Venafro Back into Hell. We all did more than enough city fighting back in Shock Force where literally any shack could just explode with a fusillade of AK fire at your poor scouts.

Red Thunder's issue to me was mainly that it didn't have all that many scenarios and campaigns for its price tag, this module will mostly fix that though. The other big issue is the change made to the air support mechanics which prevents players from exerting any control over their support even though Red Army staff did in fact, influence the position and conduct of air strikes. At the very least control of air strikes should be allowed in the planning phase... One other thing, I've also read JasonC's posts and I think his chief source was Steven Zaloga's Companion to the Red Army Handbook or just "Red Army Handbook". It's actually very detailed and informative and if you plan on designing scenarios and campaigns for the Red Army it's a must read.

Exactly, and in the opposite direction there were plenty of times German units withdrew without orders too. While plenty frontline of commanders were absolutely right to beat it while they could regardless of what Hitler and OKH were screeching there were in fact, plenty of Officers abandoning strong positions for no good reason. This led to more than a few disasters as well when withdrawing German formations were overtaken by advancing Russian columns, turning a withdrawal into a rout... If accounts of the Eastern Front were taken at face value all the time one would be led to think T-34s were growing on trees, swimming in lakes, and even hiding under the bed. Naturally this all got a lot harder as German Armies were pushed westwards, getting further from Stalin's guns but closer and closer to Nazi hangmen ready to make examples out of deserters, real or perceived...

Everyone's been saying so i'll reiterate. Your firepower > his, raze the place. Ideally all your infantry should have to do is occupy smoking craters.