SimpleSimon

There is a con to Germany's aufkragstaktik that is not normally brought up though. Namely, the hands-off and occasionally outright weak control field commanders exert over their subordinates led to a number of instances of German Officers and Leaders mindlessly charging much stronger Allied positions and suffering massacres as a result. It encouraged a bit of wild recklessness and that didn't always pay off.

So it's no secret that i'm pretty fixated on the earlier part of the war, specifically the Battles of Poland and France. A lot of the stuff in Barnes and Noble is weak pop-history and such but when I glanced over at the shelf the other week Forczyk's books on the Early War period were hard for me to pass up and i'm happy I gave them a try. It just so happens that Robert Forczyk has written two recent, detailed books on both battles and they're both really great, especially if CM ever covers these periods of the war because he goes over a lot of doctrine, tactics, and arms while not neglecting some of the higher-level context of which there is plenty of writing on. In his books he critiques the issues with many of the previous works, which he highlights two common problems many historians have been making. Namely a tendency to over-rely on German accounts of each battle, and a tendency for many authors in history to simply cite each other in circular fashion thus leading to repetition of many myths and stereotypes. Another issue of course is that most works about the Battles of France and Poland actually very light on details about each battle, and are mainly focused on the geopolitical ramifications of each invasion. Not here, Forczyk has written a pair of badly needed "soldier's eye view" accounts of the German onslaughts to the East and West. For instance Case Red has what is probably the best current narrative of the Battle of Stonne I've heard in years and it really transformed my picture of that event. You can put Google Maps up and trace the movements of individual platoons, he gets that granular at times. My only complaints are that each book is a little short of maps and visual references, which the more narrative-heavy events really need and that Forczyk seems a bit eager to leap to the defense of the underdogs in a way that I think paints an over-optimistic picture of the French and Polish Armies and their dispositions. Don't get me wrong, he makes some impressive arguments and this is a badly needed perspective among the dearth of myths and even outright lies that have emerged from the period. Case Red and Case White are a pair of seriously indispensable books for wargamers fellas, especially if Battlefront ever does this period.

Thought only the StuG IV had one. Anyway, I don't think it was too handy since it was locked to the gun's narrow traverse, but it was probably requested by crews anyway.

Ah geez here I go again. Infantry anti-tank weapons are overrated if you ask me... Officers were desperate to find silver linings to keep the men's spirits up. Behind the curtains at GHQ though it was well known that anti-tank gun crews had high fatality rates and many infantry anti-tank weapons were placebos, if they weren't more dangerous to the man using them than the tank they're being used on. (the No.74 sticky bomb) Assuming you have any of these things around that is and in fact abandonment was the most frequent fate of many of the war's anti tank weapons owing to their weight and their highly questionable usefulness among skittish, superstitious infantry who would usually much prefer to hide from enemy tanks than try to draw attention from them. Claiming that "none of them were found discarded" is not encouraging because that probably means few were being issued... British Officers discovered an epidemic of abandoned Boys Rifles in the western desert because the infantry hated the weapon's weight and felt the only thing it was good for was getting its operator killed. Meanwhile in Russia, the PTRD was actually quite well liked...but none were around until November 1941 and its issuance was still a rarity until 1943 by which point many German tanks were not vulnerable to it anymore. For a time the Russians attempted to construct huge formations of just anti-tank guns, literally a Brigade of them...fully motorized too! In practice these Brigades suffered a lot during Barbarossa. German recon would spot them and then direct the Panzers behind them elsewhere and they had lots of experience doing this in 1940 when the French tried to construct anti-tank heavy formations based on the quadrillage system that did nothing to avert history as we know it... Usually to prevent disaster many Armies would press their artillery into anti-tank, course on a number of occasions the infantry had already been overrun and the crews were down to defending themselves. Trouble was that Divisions cannot really afford to have their chief source of firepower set aside for use as anti-tank guns...the guns are too damn valuable and achieve more doing their job than having to ward off every Panzer III that gets too close to Regimental HQ. The Americans found the Pak40 so shockingly effective that they actually started to believe anti-tank guns were more effective than tank-destroyers, and began partially de-mechanizing anti-tank units. (American commanders remained oblivious until 1945 as to why charging pairs of tanks or platoons of them up obvious, exposed highways may have been a bad idea.) This attitude contributed directly to a number of units being overrun during the Battle of the Bulge who had swapped their M10s for the 3in M5 anti-tank gun, many of which were lost once they were overrun or...depopulated by heavy artillery fire as everyone found out in 1941...The Americans didn't understand that the Germans used any towed anti-tank guns at all as a matter of necessity, not choice. It was very much preferable to strap the Pak40 to anything that was big enough to move it, hence the Marder series of badly imbalanced gun-carriers. The gun's prime mover was likely to be lost or run out of gas at some point and if you couldn't move the gun annihilation by bombardment (or irrelevance by outflanking) was inevitable...so most crews ran for it after a few minutes. Can you blame them? Once you got up to utter insanity like the Pak 43...an anti-tank gun which weighed more than many armored vehicles...it was apparently time to just admit that you were better off building a tank, even a bad tank is better than none at all.

In general I tend to feel most of the scenarios are way too optimistic about unit strengths on both sides, more so Axis than Allies.

I could just lack some context here...but the StuG only has around 25-28 rounds of HE for its main gun. It's not designed for prolonged combat and not very good at suppressive fire since it lacks a coaxial machine gun. The MG34 on the roof is really just for self-defense since the gunner has to expose himself to fire it. The Ausf D used to have more ammo....but no one liked that version since the short gun it had couldn't defeat tanks easily. The Ausf G came around because the infantry desperately needed more anti-tank capacity but the StuG suffered a commensurate loss in its usefulness as an Assault-Gun because of this due to the larger size of the StuK L/48's shells and the need to stock more AP rounds. This was a particularly acute problem in the Wehrmacht too because supply lines were so stretched most tanks probably couldn't expect ammunition for days or maybe even weeks at a time. Would a resupply mechanic for tanks in the game be nice? Sure. Is it absolutely critical for us to have? I don't think so.

Not mention Jassy-Kishinev which basically knocked out Romania. SS Panzer Divisions were still conducting offensives into Hungary as late as 1945 while Berlin was being surrounded. Hitler's fury that his Balkan allies would abandon him was transformed by the remaining Waffen SS units into the last discernable Axis offensives of the war, since by then the Balkans (and Norway) were about the only place they had any forces left. The Soviets saw the Balkans as priority no.2, so outright destruction of the German forces down there was to be left for after the Berlin operation....

Assault. With a clear line of sight the squad will retain teams on overwatch and they will fire at an ordered or spotted target when not moving. Infantry will in fact, engage targets and move at the same time though, it's just that the range they can be expected to do this at is 50m, not 500m... For tanks, just plot slow points w/5-10 second pause to fire at targets you've designated from each point.

You were continuously engaged with enemy forces for a period of over 2 hours and 30 minutes without achieving a major breakthrough? Which scenario was this?

If people make over-complicated movement plans for them it won't be anything good. Realistically though most infantry would only do pretty much what the AI movement system is capable of. Go here, dismount, take up positions, await further orders. Human players are like omniscient gods in the game able to plot the precise movements of nearly every unit we've got...as well as instantly receive, process, and disseminate information and changes to our troops as if The Borg from Star Trek. The system could be better for sure, (chief problem is that the AI will not fire on historic contacts or suspected enemies only sighted ones) but it's not all that bad.

Some of the bigger maps, like heading into the Large and Huge scenarios I would like the option honestly, but it doesn't bother me much to just use trucks and jeeps instead. In the scope of the game there wouldn't be much difference.

And like, don't get me wrong Freyberg, there's a lot of validity to your point and this view that it wasn't clear cut. I'm intentionally being dramatic to illustrate a point and kind of get across a certain "zeitgeist" about the era that's been lost to time I think. The Germans particularly lamented that as the war went on the Panzer Divisions seemed to have lost their ability to inflict "tank terror" on formations of troops better led and less shocked by the appearance of armour. So while enough tanks might still penetrate the line it was no longer guaranteed that the entire front might collapse in a single decisive blow as it had in 1940 or 1941. Men triumphed over machine on a number of occasions before, during, and after World War 2. I just think that people don't realize when they're applying reasoning and thinking that has been taught to them by generations of games, movies, media, etc much of which is actually just self-referential (or mindless repetition of propaganda) and not really grounded in any kind of fact or truth. Here it's the idea, frequently implied by fiction and wielded by the propaganda of reckless, irresponsible leaders that bravery and persistence will always triumph over the superior numbers and weapons of the enemy. It bugs me enough for me to take my own stance on it, but it is not meant to invalidate yours since I also believe there's plenty of space for subjectivity on all this...

Games and movies have spoiled us a lot nowadays. It's important to understand that in 1940 not all that many people on Earth had ever seen a car before much less an airplane or a bulldozer. So you're a lowly Private in a poor nation's Army on some god-forsaken flank, you're barely literate owing to the fact that a higher education was mostly beyond your family's agrarian background as local villagers and things like telephones and photographs are a real novelty when you happen to see them on rare visits into a town. In your foxhole one awful, unfortunate morning the enemy's fire is particularly heavy, there's way more smoke than usual but instead of the usual callouts and sporadic bursts of rifle fire a terrible noise starts to echo from somewhere behind the mist. A methodic, clacking noise of metal accompanied by deep, guttural rumbles that seem to rattle the entire countryside. The ground, literally, begins to shake as the silhouette of an enormous moving block of steel and fire emerges laying waste to all before it. Where ever it looks the same place suddenly disappears violently into a cloud of thunder, dirt, and intense heat. Men from positions in front of you are fleeing already, in vain as it mows them down with fire...or maybe even runs them over as if they were ants. It didn't take long at the front to learn about what this thing is, but nothing anyone told you about it could really prepare you for it because fact is, you've never seen anything like it. It's an actual monster of the Biblical kind and whether or not God or man made it doesn't matter much because it's the worst thing that's ever happened to you. You've got a rifle, maybe some grenades, and the uniform on your back. The officers already ran away....think you're really capable of earning that medal?

The only aircraft allowed to conduct free-roam flights were recon flights, who were incidentally quite good at locating German defensive positions (artillery and HQs were the most conspicuous targets on the frontline, but other defensive positions were often located as well). IL2s did not attack or conduct any part of their mission in the search-and-destroy manner as practiced by western air forces though. Rather, they struck known and potential enemy positions passed down to them by a staff of planners at Air-Army HQ. Staff at Air Army HQ used recon obtained via their own flights, and passed information to their own squadrons from this. Substantial communication and co-planning was performed with Red Army command staff as well, so intel obtained by Army formations was also usually passed to squadrons to further verify the target. A good number of flights for any air offensive might well be directed at enemy airfields and a smaller number for rear-area logistics such as railheads and bridges. Red Pheonix Rising lists that for Operation Bagration around 12,000 sorties, usually consisting of Pe-2s and Tupolevs would be used for this mission. However over 50,000 sorties would be made against frontline positions by the IL2s during the Operation. 3,000 sorties alone were directed at the west bank of the Berezina River on the first day of operations. Not only should we be seeing the IL2 and Pe-2 in game more often, they should be able to attack specific targets. What they should not be able to do is respond to any kind of calls placed after the planning phase. During the planning phase however, the player should have way more rights than he does to wield the VVS in support of his troops. The way RT is right now few scenarios use the VVS, and usually only one or two planes meekly strafe random positions on the map before just flying away with most of their ordinance unused...

It's not unreasonable for airplanes to target structures, TRPs, and vehicles though. I'm just saying that Battlefront's reaction to "airplanes are too precise" was a knee-jerk reaction that went too far to the other extreme of "airplanes should have little to no role in the game" which is not accurate either.

On at least one or two occasions, I have seen them manage to kill a T-34 with their HEAT round...that's not something i'd usually ask of them though.

It was a great way to earn a medal...posthumously. Tanks had a way of crashing into the frontline...and just utterly melting it. Unless the line had lots of depth, prepared defenses, rough terrain, and experienced troops resistant to morale shocks it was very hard to repel a big enough horde of tanks just crashing into the front. The Russians for all the effort they went to preparing their extremely thorough line at Kursk, with full knowledge of the impending German attack, still came close to being overrun. At El Alamein the previous year, Montgomery's completely braindead attack on the thickest section of the German line....still succeeded because he had enough armor to make it succeed. Casualties be damned. A thick defense line can reliably inflict heavy casualties on armor but even the most thorough line couldn't guarantee the enemy wouldn't achieve his objectives.

Interesting enough was how many Armies went back to using them during the war, almost always for lack of motor vehicles of course. The Germans actually planned horses back into the Division Supply Train and Hospitals for Volksgrenadiers and even the strange late war Panzer Corp formation. I doubt many of these formations ever had their assigned horse allotments though...so many died in the East either from wounds or unfortunately being slaughtered and eaten by starving troops. Soviet Cavalry Divisions on the other hand were straight up and lasted until the 1950s. They never attacked mounted of course, but the they were fully horse drawn Divisions IIRC. Very effective too given the vastness of Eastern Europe and the lack of proper roads but the Soviets could tell they'd have no role once the war ended and I think most of them disappeared in the 1950s to be reorganized as Mechanized Corps.

Armies used hundreds of thousands of horses too during the war, but zero developers have wanted to open that can of worms in their war games thus far it seems.

Point bombardment in CMWW2 is a suggestion of target, I don't need it to be more than that personally because I know bombing in WW2 was extremely inaccurate but still happened with friendly troops around none-the-less. It should be used on enemy rear areas (suspected HQ locations were frequently bombed) and known defensive positions that a squadron would've been briefed on with photo and map reference before their sortie. Leave it up to players to figure out why using a P-47 on a suspected German sniper nest within 200m of their troops is a bad idea. The other two problems with air support in CM right now are not limited to RT, mainly, that squadrons are too timid about using all of their ordinance and the other problem that the scenario designers often feature only one or two airplanes in "support" when in WW2 attacks were made in squadron or even gruppe strength (16+ airplanes!!!!!) on targets that are very much in the scope of larger CM scenarios. Aerial bombing was super inaccurate...but that was well known and thus targets were attacked the same way as by artillery, via saturation bombardment.

But towns. buildings and other large set-pieces would've been legitimate targets, and are in CM scale. Nothing about tactical air support is outside of scope. Stuka squadrons bombed tanks during the Battle of France in 1940. That accuracy of aerial bombing is terrible doesn't mean it didn't happen and Battlefront's reasoning for artificially crippling RT's air support mechanics is flimsy. The issue is the way that support requests are laid out by the engine and user interface...which are carry overs from Shock Force and do not fit 1944 well. A better idea would've been to simply restrict air support requests to the planning phase and allow more options in time of arrival over a target than "lol no".

And like lol...is there a reason it shouldn't? A straight ahead fire and advance command isn't really a lot to ask of troops no matter how terrible the quality. Guys just expect it to work against 50 Americans in a trench line with a pair of Browning .30cals on overwatch….

Steel-Division II handles Regiment/Brigade level stuff quite well in its Army General mode. So do Graviteam's games although they're a bit harder to learn.

Lots of people say that the Syrians seem hard to play...but that's only because they are usually on the defensive and they are not supported very well in most of their scenarios. The assumption that the Syrian Air Force would be irrelevant in any conflict is not only rather uninteresting, but as the Civil War has revealed, inaccurate. Saddam Hussein's useless air force should not be considered the norm by which all other powers in the Middle East are held to. I suppose much was unknown and unclear back in 2007 when Shock Force was released. Crucially the Syrian Air Force occupies a role in Soviet Deep-Battle methodology without which the doctrine is really crippled. The Syrians do not seem to be a strictly Soviet-style military force...but they are equipped and organized like one. This means that for the most part it's really unfair to expect much of Syrian forces without more instances of things like the D-30 showing up, the Hind, the SU-25 etc.

An excellent find, I've got some notes on it. At the beginning of the unrest in 2011, the Syrian Army was structured and oriented to defend against an Israeli invasion and project force into Lebanon, while ensuring that no one force could execute a successful coup attempt. Some of the scenario designers picked up on the possibility of internal upheaval in Syria back in 09 before its real life civil war broke out too. It's interesting to note that in spite of this, Assad's regime had enough forces set aside to threaten Lebanon with an invasion. Prospective scenario designers should know that a campaign depicting Syria on the war march into a smaller Arab nation, a pseudo-Lebanon, would be credible. After Syria’s defeat by Israel in 1976, nine of the Syrian Army’s thirteen divisions were placed under the operational command of three Corps headquarters in an apparent effort to delegate decision-making authority.3 In practice, division commanders still often reported directly to the President. This doesn't surprise me that much. The vast demobilizations as a result of the Cold War's end have effectively served to bump every formation as we know it up a level. I think for most nations today, Divisions effectively work like Corps or Armies, while Brigades and Regiments perform what used to be a Division's job etc all the way down. Chief item to me is a better understanding of the role military forces equipped with lots of legacy Warsaw Pact arms are expected to perform. For the most part, it's control of the nation by the regime in charge, but some units have been set aside for projection of force outside the borders. How well these units execute a Soviet style Deep-Battle is uncertain I think, but if the wars with Israel are any indication nothing is more important than air power and unfortunately this document doesn't have much to say on the Syrian Air Force. The Civil War however, has revealed them as surprisingly aggressive...and very indiscriminate...in their support of Assad's ground forces. I think the scenario designers should, in the future, be more willing to include air support options for the Syrians in CM scenarios, especially the large ones.