SimpleSimon

Our living standards today are a result of globalized markets and international trade. This crisis very much plays into the hands of Protectionists everywhere, but the world can't go back to the economy of 1940 or 1960 or even 1980. There's too many people now and too many needs to be met that the far smaller scales of history could never meet. Globalized markets are interconnected now for better or worse.
This is part of the reason why the US is effectively unable to conduct a 1942 style mass mobilization of resources. There aren't tons of closed factories sitting around everywhere on mothball. They're all in other countries, but not always the countries you might think. Since the end of the Cold War the Democracies have been configuring exclusively on markets of service and speculation, more money in, less money out on payroll and HR. American workers are too expensive, demanding things like health care benefits, pensions, and the audacity of live-able pay! Crazy right? Yet it wasn't to China or India that most of that manufacturing went...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports
China is only the 2nd largest source of imports for the US, the first is the European Union. Combined with non-Eurozone (lots of Eastern Europe) members by the way imports from China are barely one half of the total, and US imports from the rest of North America (ie: Canada and Mexico) also greatly exceed imports from China. This is a major reason why in 2010 the Fed rode to the rescue of the Eurozone and not to the Chinese. (The other major reason was the considerable effectiveness of the People's Bank of China in fighting a financial crisis. Both the Fed and the People's Bank can control interest rates, but the People's Bank can also set the terms of credit issuance to banks.) 
While it would be mistaken to believe that China's economy is reliant on American markets, the fact that the Yuan is pegged to the Dollar also means China doesn't have anything to gain from depressed American consumption. Trump's trade war came as a real shock to Beijing, for reasons I can guess had a lot do with Beijing's perception that American leadership was bound to be rational where money was involved...
Far be it from me to point out the depressing number of times American media and American leaders have historically played up to groundless fear and paranoia of an Asian Nemesis. The upcoming round of China-bashing that is starting to emerge from American media isn't even original, just more canned talking-points from the 2000s that were themselves repackaged nationalist/protectionist cliches from the 1980s against Japan. Communist leaders are often baffled by the concept of "Political Theater" we conduct in the west, but that's because power and mobility in Communist states is usually handled by party insiders and internal lines and not by popular election. 
Chinese leaders are going to worry about China first, but that shouldn't lead one to believe that they would find it easy to abandon the US, or desirable to compete with it.

We only have to look back to our favourite period of history to see how extreme situations are used by populist politicians to whip people up into stupidity that can wreck entire countries...
Let's hope we just have a pandemic and nothing else...
I am all for holding the politicians accountable no matter which country...

Probably the most effective answer to both controlling the spread of the virus and keeping the global economy at a reasonable idle is the answer leaders are under increasing pressure to divert from, which is the current course of action. Discourse is quickly turning into a false dilemma on either releasing restrictions entirely or clamping down more. Probably the course we're on is the most appropriate one at this time but you wouldn't know it from the slippery slopes being dropped by both sides demanding the most extreme measures of either end probably neither of which are appropriate. 
Release restrictions and the infections will shoot up again, clamp down more and you risk shutting down critical infrastructure and supply flows that many people may well be barely subsisting on as is. We shouldn't forget either that rigidly enforced stay-at-home orders and draconian travel restrictions enter into some very dangerous political territory posing lots of questions that will need good answers one day, if not tomorrow, then someday. 
Other than that, my own opinion is that unless the European Union takes some seriously unilateral action it will be the most prominent casualty of the crisis on its current course. I don't want to sound too narrow about that from my own American perspective, but Brussels did not set a very strong precedent during the Eurozone Crisis in 2010 and a lot of that rolled out in the long run to things like Brexit. Nothing will happen right away I think, but without some kind of entirely self-owned action I can see the European Union reduced to effectively League-of-Nations status by 2030 if it's still around at all. 

Respectfully there's nothing historically accurate about the current system though. The VVS was capable of conducting highly meticulous airstrikes against fixed or known positions thanks to a combination of aerial reconnaissance from above and battlefield reports from below passed to Air Army HQ. There's no good reason the player shouldn't be given the power to abstract this capability in the planning phase as long as the game has air strikes at all. If the idea is that the team just doesn't want air strikes in game, I get that, but then they should just disable the feature entirely and leave it to the scenario designers to abstract. I don't think this is necessary though (and it would be highly disappointing) but the easy fix to me anyway seems to just limit point attacks to the planning phase (not available for call in after the mission starts) and limit area attacks to the action phase. (Loitering aircraft can be given a start time and after a set time will disappear and cannot be recalled.) 
Certainly the idea that World War 2 air forces conducted immediate, precise point attacks on individual targets with the accuracy of modern JDAMs or guided munitions is wrong, but attacks on point targets were in fact done. They didn't just send one airplane and hoped it got lucky, they sent tons of them and hoped someone got lucky. 

Respectfully there's nothing historically accurate about the current system though. The VVS was capable of conducting highly meticulous airstrikes against fixed or known positions thanks to a combination of aerial reconnaissance from above and battlefield reports from below passed to Air Army HQ. There's no good reason the player shouldn't be given the power to abstract this capability in the planning phase as long as the game has air strikes at all. If the idea is that the team just doesn't want air strikes in game, I get that, but then they should just disable the feature entirely and leave it to the scenario designers to abstract. I don't think this is necessary though (and it would be highly disappointing) but the easy fix to me anyway seems to just limit point attacks to the planning phase (not available for call in after the mission starts) and limit area attacks to the action phase. (Loitering aircraft can be given a start time and after a set time will disappear and cannot be recalled.) 
Certainly the idea that World War 2 air forces conducted immediate, precise point attacks on individual targets with the accuracy of modern JDAMs or guided munitions is wrong, but attacks on point targets were in fact done. They didn't just send one airplane and hoped it got lucky, they sent tons of them and hoped someone got lucky. 

So Eugen's games have always really been hit or miss to me. I really loved RUSE back in the day but the Wargame series really fell flat with me. Overly fixated on multiplayer gaming which im not really interested in anymore. On top of that the Wargame was desperately in need of a majorly redesigned user-interface so it wasn't so overwhelming and saturing the player with enormous numbers of units basically not-at-all different from one another in the context of the game. 
Steel Division 1 was also very uninteresting to me since it was obviously still designed entirely around multiplayer. Steel Division 2 was released last year and I only grabbed the game back in fall in time for the Vistula DLC and it's honestly the first game from Eugen in over a decade that I could recommend to anyone....with some notes and commentary on its overall design.
The new Army General mode is the thing Eugen's games have desperately needed for years. Wargame's really basic campaign generators weren't bad, but were crippled by cheating tactical AI and its bad user interface. Steel Division 2 has finally incorporated large numbers of semi-automated command mechanics that allow the player to delegate basic attacks and holding actions to AI commanders now. These mechanics have proven utterly crucial for me in finally being able to actually recommend Steel Division 2 for those interested in the game. It's still overwhelming at times....but crucially the player can now fine-tune the overall workload. You can do things like set aside artillery for counter-battery fire or planned missions that they will engage in without the need for tight micromanagement. 
It still takes quite a bit of practice, learning, and frustration to grasp the overall game but it's really rewarding once you do. At least now the scale able automation allows players to "bite off" and learn acceptable chunks of game at a time. Once I learned the game I really felt Army General and its depicted battles (now including a Red Army campaign against Finland in 1944!) were both exciting and accurate recreations of the battles they depict that avoided the overly-scripted pitfall of many strategy games while also creating entirely organic situations that could both reward you or punish you for sticking with...or (crucially) disregarding doctrine. 
As always Eugen's Iris-Engine technology is really impressive stuff, allowing the player to look down on the world as if a God and then zoom right down into the action to see nearly-shooter level graphics is really stunning stuff and Eugen can be proud of their achievement as far visual technology goes. Overall, if you catch the game on sale? I suggest you grab it, but I can sympathize with anyone who has too many bad memories of previous Eugen games. It's still very much a "Wargame" sort of game but Eugen is definitely refining its games into something more accessible to a wider audience than just the hardcore multiplayers. 

As far as I can tell, it's not omniscient, it's just challenging as it should be. Tubes are the biggest threat to your men on the field and you'll see real massacres happen if the enemy happens to bring an Artillery Brigade. If they did than I hope you brought lots of airplanes and tanks or both. It's all about match ups you know? Yeah, I could agree that the artillery seems a bit quick on the draw for the AI, (the main issues seems to have been that counter-battery fire was super reliable) but it's not distinctly clear to me, after several months of playing mind you, that it's cheating. If it is, it's cloaked well enough to not be a major bother to me. Like I said, if the Russians show up with 12+ 122mm guns and all you've got are some mortars you had better expect a massacre. 
https://ibb.co/KhPsd2C
From a battle in the North sector of the Berezina... The men on the right are an entire Battalion of Osttruppen who ran into Guards advancing toward the farmstead in middle. The T-34s are mine (German) lifted off the Russians at one point or another during previous fighting. I only had 4 of them and I had been positioning them for an advance elsewhere (just behind them was a road I planned on fast moving them up the left section of the map to reinforce a weakening section of frontline. Instead they majorly assisted the Osttruppen advance the forest in the foreground and I redeployed them later on. Had they not been there the Osttruppen might well have lost (the heart icon means that they are brittle and the stars are their Officers). 
https://ibb.co/gTBFBSq
A photo I just like of an 88mm gun from the same battle. The men along the Berezina have the advantage of occupying a sector that happened to be well covered in anti-aircraft weaponry. Given the scale of the Russian attack I naturally ended up pressing these guns into the battle where I was surprised to see them engage and shoot down attacking IL-2s! This was most fortunate, I might well have lost the battle without them and ended up suffering quite a few casualties to roving IL-2s even with them. 
https://ibb.co/JHPgpJ8
The same gun's field of view. 
https://ibb.co/X7bvXKy
The strategic situation just before the battle. The Russians attacked me with the two Motorized Rifle Battalions and an IL-2 Wing that showed up from outside the picture, the *Disorganized* label was placed over the Russian units after those units botched a previous attack and they could not participate. The flag is an objective for both sides and yes that is a Swastika, not a mod. Eugen has decided to fully depict Axis insignia in the game. 
The boxed RONA is the deploy area for a group of units, and in that spot the Osttruppen RONA detachment can deploy. 
https://ibb.co/YtpT155
The situation in the south near Borissof and Studienka. On the left on top of 5th Panzer Division's deployment area is the Festung Borissof, two Battalions of the 13th. Panzergrenadier Regiment, and it's Regimental HQ.  In the middle of the road are the nearly depleted French SS and the KG Altmark who I was able to send into reserve. On the right facing the Russian advance is my principle line...which I plan on folding up before the Russians attack. On the right is one Panzergrenadier Battalion, a pair of mixed Security Battalions, another Kampgrupper, the 505th Heavy Panzer Brigade, and an Artillery Brigade. Most of the units at the very front are dug-in...which means if the Russians attack the defending units get free access to an assortment of anti-tank gun bunkers, machine gun bunkers, trenches, barbed wire obstacles, and pits for artillery. Seems secure right? Wrong. The Russians facing them have over 260 tanks ready to absolutely smash that part of the line, but since I was playing against the Easy AI the AI decided to go on a silly flanking maneuver to the south which I was able to check with a spare KG and Security Battalion. 
Before the Russians attack I will fold up this line and retreat to just outside of Borissof. Sadly, the game has no city maps and fighting in a considered "urban" environment will be auto-resolved. What a shame. 
 
You'll see tons of that in Steel Division 2. Note, that the game isn't going to do all that much to help you learn how to play, and for some time you may be needing to save-reload scenarios quite a bit before you figure out what you're doing wrong. On easy it's still very challenging, and the workload can be enormous. 
I'm not too crazy about the tactical battles effectively just being the multiplayer skirmishes but against an AI. In the tactical mode the game just uses multiplayer maps and unfortunately this leads to many battles fought in the same exact map. The enormous ToE depth and strategy mode mitigate this a lot though, as no two battles ever play alike on the same map. I also think the user interface gets saturated fast and when battles heat up it starts getting rough to keep track of all the units. I found attacking extremely difficult until I started using the smart-commands and more carefully evaluating the maps. I also didn't realize that the game was factoring in casualties on both sides into the score, so I thought that it was one of those (bad) games that was going to punish me for failing to capture every single flag. It doesn't, but that kind of nuance isn't communicated very well to the player. 
Also I still can't tell what the game's rules are for recovery of men and assets. It seems after battles both sides get a certain amount of men and equipment back based on how well they did but I have found zero reference material to indicate how this is determined. 
 

The game's ability to construct completely natural battles that affect each other over the broad term is really commendable. Ive been playing the Berezina stroke of Barbarossa as the Germans and it opens with a thin German line being held by a mixture of French SS, Security (Sicher) Battalions, and the odd mixed Kampgrupper-Osttruppen. The French SS are very motivated and professional...but not well armed. Only the HQ section has any Panzerfausts. Many of the Security Battalions don't even have MG34s, but the MG08 Spandau's of the Kaiser! The Osttruppen are good for holding rear areas and have no motor transport...in a fight you can only count on them to stand if the local SS Gendarmes are around to keep them from running away and they have absolutely zero anti-tank weapons of any kind. The one benefit of the KG they're in are the 5 or so ready Tiger Tanks....but they won't be able to stop the Russian Tank Corp charging up the road.
Rather than try to compose a continuous frontline I decided that, dug-in or not, holding the map and stopping the Russians cold was impossible. So I set up the French SS and Tiger Tanks into defensive "boxes" that would allow the Tigers to snipe any tanks from  a distance while shielding them from attempts by infantry to push them out of my strongpoints. The Russians generally opened their attacks with the Motorcycle or Recon Brigades of the Tank Corp behind them and if it wasn't for the Tigers the 10 or Valentine Tanks and mixed armored cars they had might well run the French SS off the map...who have nothing to stop them with. This would be devastating since somewhere along the road to the Berezina I needed to make a stand to await 5th Panzer Division's arrival. 
The forests along the northern stretch of the Berezina are held mostly by Sicher Battalions who can count on Flak battalions. In a really crazy tribute the ToE mania of Eugen's games, most of those guys are armed with Czech light machine guns and even a few Polish 7TP tanks. The ominous red outline of the front is approaching the initial positions and im weighing retreating or standing. This is all great stuff. 
I'll start taking screen caps of these battles in the future for better narrative takes. Should be easy since the game records all games for later visual replay. You can really study what was going on.

So Eugen's games have always really been hit or miss to me. I really loved RUSE back in the day but the Wargame series really fell flat with me. Overly fixated on multiplayer gaming which im not really interested in anymore. On top of that the Wargame was desperately in need of a majorly redesigned user-interface so it wasn't so overwhelming and saturing the player with enormous numbers of units basically not-at-all different from one another in the context of the game. 
Steel Division 1 was also very uninteresting to me since it was obviously still designed entirely around multiplayer. Steel Division 2 was released last year and I only grabbed the game back in fall in time for the Vistula DLC and it's honestly the first game from Eugen in over a decade that I could recommend to anyone....with some notes and commentary on its overall design.
The new Army General mode is the thing Eugen's games have desperately needed for years. Wargame's really basic campaign generators weren't bad, but were crippled by cheating tactical AI and its bad user interface. Steel Division 2 has finally incorporated large numbers of semi-automated command mechanics that allow the player to delegate basic attacks and holding actions to AI commanders now. These mechanics have proven utterly crucial for me in finally being able to actually recommend Steel Division 2 for those interested in the game. It's still overwhelming at times....but crucially the player can now fine-tune the overall workload. You can do things like set aside artillery for counter-battery fire or planned missions that they will engage in without the need for tight micromanagement. 
It still takes quite a bit of practice, learning, and frustration to grasp the overall game but it's really rewarding once you do. At least now the scale able automation allows players to "bite off" and learn acceptable chunks of game at a time. Once I learned the game I really felt Army General and its depicted battles (now including a Red Army campaign against Finland in 1944!) were both exciting and accurate recreations of the battles they depict that avoided the overly-scripted pitfall of many strategy games while also creating entirely organic situations that could both reward you or punish you for sticking with...or (crucially) disregarding doctrine. 
As always Eugen's Iris-Engine technology is really impressive stuff, allowing the player to look down on the world as if a God and then zoom right down into the action to see nearly-shooter level graphics is really stunning stuff and Eugen can be proud of their achievement as far visual technology goes. Overall, if you catch the game on sale? I suggest you grab it, but I can sympathize with anyone who has too many bad memories of previous Eugen games. It's still very much a "Wargame" sort of game but Eugen is definitely refining its games into something more accessible to a wider audience than just the hardcore multiplayers. 

Indeed it's tempting to view the modules as low-logistic alternatives to a full release but I think it's been shown that this isn't necessarily true or universal. 

Aurelius is right. It's really unnecessary to overthink the geopolitical background of whatever is motivating a conflict between West and East for a video game. All of that stuff would be above the paygrades the games depict right up to the highest levels in game. Battalion commanders and below need not concern themselves with whatever metaphorical kettle has finally blown its lid and graduated from a crisis into a full on war. All they need to know is that about 50 T-64s and an accompanying Motor Rifle Brigade are charging the forest road toward your position. En avant! 

We don't need a story. Just an opportunity to play Late war USSR formations against Late war Western Allies formations. The rest we can make up ourselves! 

SimpleSimon,
Thanks for passing the word!  Decades ago, the US Army put out a small black covered book on the Polish Invasion. should be online at army.mil. Also, have you seen this?

https://www.bookdepository.com/Polish-Army-1939-Vincent-W-Rospond/9780990364948

Something else of note, I believe, is that the Poles, contrary to myth and widely held belief, put the hurts on the Luftwaffe and were not destroyed on the ground, caught unprepared. To the contrary, the Poles uderstood what was coming and operated operated for weeks from a whole bunch of dispersal fields and even with some primitive aircraft, inflicted painful losses on Hitler's mighty air arm. Bad enough that it took it quite some time to get ready for the upcoming invasion of France, etc. Further, the Poles, using their ground attack aircraft, caused the Wehrmacht a lot of misery, too. In toto, the Polish Air Force inflicted damage greatly disproportionate to its size and almost totally unknown, too.

Regards,

John Kettler

Oh no here comes another Simon infodump lol...
The biggest bottleneck was manpower which Germany's industry was sharing with the Army. The Heer took priority and the entire reason why production didn't fall and even increased during the war was simply because the Nazis turned to ruthless forced labor to keep the civilian economy functional and work sub-human untermensch to death at the same. 
There was a lot going around that Speer had worked some kind of miracle in the armaments industry, but this was only partly true. He did inject some rationality into the system of armaments production that Fritz Todt and Goering had been badly mismanaging but ultimately it was his partnership with Himmler that yielded his success in squeezing the German economy to its absolute maximum. The upshot of this partnership not only allowed Germany to maintain and even increase armaments production during the war, but also enabled Germans to maintain a much better standard of living than the occupied territories in spite of all the bombing right up until the nation's infrastructure finally began to collapse as the frontline overtook it. 
The downshot which of course the Nazis weren't likely to care about was the horrifying death toll and misery being inflicted upon the rest of Europe while Nazi forced requisitions of labor and food literally exported the war's ruinous effects on other civilian economies. Aside from the moral outrage of such actions the Nazis may not have saved themselves as much trouble as they believed either. In 1943 the French coal industry collapsed requiring Germany to export its own coal supplies to keep the French rail and energy network functioning. Shutdown of transport would paralyze the movements of military formations and if the electrical grid failed work on the Atlantic Wall would halt. Famine broke out in Italy the same year and badly undermined what little support was left for Mussolini's regime, the Allied invasion was the straw that broke that camel's back even though it was more like a falling tree...
If what happened in France was any indication than allowing Russian troops to retreat would've invited defeat and annihilation. French and British troops were allowed to retreat in 1940 and this led to mass routs all the time. Generals kept informing Weygand and London that they were conducting "tactical withdrawals" of course...right on through Paris and beyond. Paris was the center of the rail network by the way and giving it up would ensure German victory by freezing military transport and cutting off the French forces still holding the Maginot Line. The same was true of Moscow. Fighting from beyond it would be pointless, so the Stalinist authorities ordered men to stand where they were and fight. Horrifying yes but I simply cannot find anything to indicate that these measures weren't the chief reason why the Soviet Union survived 1941.
Other explanations like German supply problems and the weather could only partly explain the failure of Barbarossa and definitely played a role. Remember the most frustrating fact of all...Stalin's mismanagement was most likely why the situation got as desperate as it did and why the Red Army was so unprepared for the invasion. Yes the consequences of these actions inflicted many disasters and injustices upon Red Army troops. Many times Generals were right to request a retreat and men accused of desertion were in fact following orders to reposition or were just lost etc. It was hard to say, so the Stalinists took no chances and as distasteful and horrifying as it was it's hard to argue that the measures the Communists took to ensure the Soviet Union's survival weren't...well...effective. 
 Stalinist measures most definitely got in the way of the war's prosecution after the first year, but crucially Stalin came around to that fact as the war went on. Though it'd be untrue to say that he had come to trust his Generals and relaxed Communist influence over the military entirely. Certainly the desperate measures of 1941 were not borne out of any strategic insight or sound military rationality. Moscow was afraid of losing control, but that's just a sign of how seriously Soviet authorities took the threat they were facing. By comparison France never took the threat it faced from Germany seriously, and look where that got us all. 
It's crucial to understand that in both Europe and Eurasia there was a great and visceral fear of a man on horseback or a military man gone self-proclaimed Dictator. Since Francisco Franco, Miklos Horthy, and Philippe Petain all became that very nightmare it's harder than one thinks to accuse the Communists of having been irrationally paranoid...
God I should go get a beer. You know you all don't need to read my crap if you don't want to lol. 

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. 
 

Dude, the disease affects roughly 0.000326% of the Chinese population and people are calling it a pandemic.....It's utter bollocks, just like SARS, Sharia dominated no go zones, The Steele Dossier, chemical attacks on Douma, The Deal Of The Century and a host of other BS that the MSM keep ramming down our throats in the hope that while we are choking on it, we won't notice that their lords & masters are robbing us blind. 
Apologies if this is too political, but really.....FFS! 

Yeah I don't think so.
Have you looked at the definition of racism? Not shopping in China town because you are afraid of being contaminated by something that is not present in any population in Toronto just because the look of the skin colour of the people in that area matches the skin colour of the people who are suffering with the outbreak of this virus sounds like a match to the definition to me.

Backstory?  Strategic objectives?  Counterfactual? ........... Why? 
The more complicated this is the less likely it would be worth while to do.  
Port over CMRT Soviet TOE into CMFB.   Then sell it.   

lol how many accounts and narratives of World War 2 do we all rattle off today uncritically as gospel when it's just Cold War posturing from both sides? The Anglo-Americans with their concepts of rule-by-consent and citizen-soldiers absolutely never would've been able to stomach the kinds of human losses the Soviet Union did. They'd've all more than likely ended up going the way the French did as a peace/collaborationist faction used the confusion and chaos to seize power, legitimately or not, and then seek terms with the Nazi thugs. The unfortunate truth was many leaders in Western Europe in 1940 were more worried about preserving their Armies than the states those Armies were responsible for protecting. Not only was there a visceral fear of a communist coup running in rear areas, but for many of Europe's old-fashioned Monarchist leaders the collapse of Democracy presented them with many opportunities to roll back the achievements in social progress and equality yielded throughout the industrial booms of the 19th century. With the Gestapo's thugs ready to assist in rounding up liberals and intellectuals. Churchill was certainly not that type of Leader, but if the situation was bad enough it just wouldn't be up to him anymore. He'd have ended up like Paul Reynaud, valiantly vowing to fight from the end in a prison cell he was thrown in by his own countrymen...
In the midst of crisis Paris and London consented to allowing their Generals to withdraw from understandably hopeless situations. This created a tendency for Generals to withdraw all the way to Paris and then keep right on withdrawing into the Loire or the Bordeaux...with fatal consequences for the Third Republic and even worse consequences for the Republic's many Jewish and minority citizens it was responsible for protecting. A year later the Soviet Union would tolerate no withdrawals, and told its Generals what to think...or else. Who's capital withstood the full weight of a Nazi onslaught in the end? Yes it led to many disasters, yes it led to much resentment between Stalinist authorities and its soldiers in the Red Army. The greatest disaster of them all however would be from a Nazi victory.
It's true that Lend-Lease aid wasn't really perceived on the battlefield until around late 1942 or so. However, the Russian narrative plays down the most important element of Lend-Lease aid which was not hardware, but food. When the invasion began the civilian economy nearly collapsed due to the loss of huge swathes farmland and food stocks. Soviet agriculture was barely out of a phase in it's history where a bad harvest might well lead to famine even if Stalinist authorities weren't actively manipulating food supplies just to punish recalcitrant Ukrainian nationalists. Soviet authorities couldn't hide when foreign made equipment was at the front, but what they did hide for years was the docks of Arkhangelsk spent their first year packed with vital food supplies and rations for soldiers and factories workers barely subsisting on watery soups and a foul tea made of pine-needles to ward off scurvy. The last functioning thread of the civilian economy in the dire year of 1941 was literally the food network and that is largely thanks to huge imports of food stocks from the Anglo-Americans. If the civilian economy collapsed then war production would collapse with it with catastrophic consequences for the war effort. 
Victory over the Fascist Menace was obtained through the collective effort of the Allied  powers and the coalition they assembled to triumph over it. Any one of them could've survived on their own, but precisely none of the Big 3 would've been able to achieve victory without the other 2. 
 

I'd lean more towards something in the 1980-85 period myself when both NATO and the Warsaw Pact had a similar level of readiness for a major war. Around this time both sides were facing major junctions in terms of arms procurement and manpower balancing. Lots of old equipment was still in stock for the Warsaw Pact partners like the Mosin Nagant and T-34 at the same time the Russians were bringing out the gas-turbine powered T-80. The M1 Abrams and Leopard 2 had only just entered production and substantial numbers of M48 Pattons were still kitting out the Federal Republic's Panzer Brigades. 
Meanwhile many of the NATO signatories were finding it necessary to slash headcounts. France had effectively given up on Divisions and reorganized most of its Army around small Brigades. While Britain was progressively de-mechanizing BAOR (British Army on the Rhine), turning Armored Divisions back into Infantry Divisions because of the need to cut expenses. These soft de-mobilizations were a major reason the US was conducting its REFORGER exercises to quickly deploy III Corp to Europe, because it looked as if NATO wasn't going to be capable of composing a continuous front if war broke out in the 1980s. 

Oh no here comes another Simon infodump lol...
The biggest bottleneck was manpower which Germany's industry was sharing with the Army. The Heer took priority and the entire reason why production didn't fall and even increased during the war was simply because the Nazis turned to ruthless forced labor to keep the civilian economy functional and work sub-human untermensch to death at the same. 
There was a lot going around that Speer had worked some kind of miracle in the armaments industry, but this was only partly true. He did inject some rationality into the system of armaments production that Fritz Todt and Goering had been badly mismanaging but ultimately it was his partnership with Himmler that yielded his success in squeezing the German economy to its absolute maximum. The upshot of this partnership not only allowed Germany to maintain and even increase armaments production during the war, but also enabled Germans to maintain a much better standard of living than the occupied territories in spite of all the bombing right up until the nation's infrastructure finally began to collapse as the frontline overtook it. 
The downshot which of course the Nazis weren't likely to care about was the horrifying death toll and misery being inflicted upon the rest of Europe while Nazi forced requisitions of labor and food literally exported the war's ruinous effects on other civilian economies. Aside from the moral outrage of such actions the Nazis may not have saved themselves as much trouble as they believed either. In 1943 the French coal industry collapsed requiring Germany to export its own coal supplies to keep the French rail and energy network functioning. Shutdown of transport would paralyze the movements of military formations and if the electrical grid failed work on the Atlantic Wall would halt. Famine broke out in Italy the same year and badly undermined what little support was left for Mussolini's regime, the Allied invasion was the straw that broke that camel's back even though it was more like a falling tree...
If what happened in France was any indication than allowing Russian troops to retreat would've invited defeat and annihilation. French and British troops were allowed to retreat in 1940 and this led to mass routs all the time. Generals kept informing Weygand and London that they were conducting "tactical withdrawals" of course...right on through Paris and beyond. Paris was the center of the rail network by the way and giving it up would ensure German victory by freezing military transport and cutting off the French forces still holding the Maginot Line. The same was true of Moscow. Fighting from beyond it would be pointless, so the Stalinist authorities ordered men to stand where they were and fight. Horrifying yes but I simply cannot find anything to indicate that these measures weren't the chief reason why the Soviet Union survived 1941.
Other explanations like German supply problems and the weather could only partly explain the failure of Barbarossa and definitely played a role. Remember the most frustrating fact of all...Stalin's mismanagement was most likely why the situation got as desperate as it did and why the Red Army was so unprepared for the invasion. Yes the consequences of these actions inflicted many disasters and injustices upon Red Army troops. Many times Generals were right to request a retreat and men accused of desertion were in fact following orders to reposition or were just lost etc. It was hard to say, so the Stalinists took no chances and as distasteful and horrifying as it was it's hard to argue that the measures the Communists took to ensure the Soviet Union's survival weren't...well...effective. 
 Stalinist measures most definitely got in the way of the war's prosecution after the first year, but crucially Stalin came around to that fact as the war went on. Though it'd be untrue to say that he had come to trust his Generals and relaxed Communist influence over the military entirely. Certainly the desperate measures of 1941 were not borne out of any strategic insight or sound military rationality. Moscow was afraid of losing control, but that's just a sign of how seriously Soviet authorities took the threat they were facing. By comparison France never took the threat it faced from Germany seriously, and look where that got us all. 
It's crucial to understand that in both Europe and Eurasia there was a great and visceral fear of a man on horseback or a military man gone self-proclaimed Dictator. Since Francisco Franco, Miklos Horthy, and Philippe Petain all became that very nightmare it's harder than one thinks to accuse the Communists of having been irrationally paranoid...
God I should go get a beer. You know you all don't need to read my crap if you don't want to lol. 

Oh no here comes another Simon infodump lol...
The biggest bottleneck was manpower which Germany's industry was sharing with the Army. The Heer took priority and the entire reason why production didn't fall and even increased during the war was simply because the Nazis turned to ruthless forced labor to keep the civilian economy functional and work sub-human untermensch to death at the same. 
There was a lot going around that Speer had worked some kind of miracle in the armaments industry, but this was only partly true. He did inject some rationality into the system of armaments production that Fritz Todt and Goering had been badly mismanaging but ultimately it was his partnership with Himmler that yielded his success in squeezing the German economy to its absolute maximum. The upshot of this partnership not only allowed Germany to maintain and even increase armaments production during the war, but also enabled Germans to maintain a much better standard of living than the occupied territories in spite of all the bombing right up until the nation's infrastructure finally began to collapse as the frontline overtook it. 
The downshot which of course the Nazis weren't likely to care about was the horrifying death toll and misery being inflicted upon the rest of Europe while Nazi forced requisitions of labor and food literally exported the war's ruinous effects on other civilian economies. Aside from the moral outrage of such actions the Nazis may not have saved themselves as much trouble as they believed either. In 1943 the French coal industry collapsed requiring Germany to export its own coal supplies to keep the French rail and energy network functioning. Shutdown of transport would paralyze the movements of military formations and if the electrical grid failed work on the Atlantic Wall would halt. Famine broke out in Italy the same year and badly undermined what little support was left for Mussolini's regime, the Allied invasion was the straw that broke that camel's back even though it was more like a falling tree...
If what happened in France was any indication than allowing Russian troops to retreat would've invited defeat and annihilation. French and British troops were allowed to retreat in 1940 and this led to mass routs all the time. Generals kept informing Weygand and London that they were conducting "tactical withdrawals" of course...right on through Paris and beyond. Paris was the center of the rail network by the way and giving it up would ensure German victory by freezing military transport and cutting off the French forces still holding the Maginot Line. The same was true of Moscow. Fighting from beyond it would be pointless, so the Stalinist authorities ordered men to stand where they were and fight. Horrifying yes but I simply cannot find anything to indicate that these measures weren't the chief reason why the Soviet Union survived 1941.
Other explanations like German supply problems and the weather could only partly explain the failure of Barbarossa and definitely played a role. Remember the most frustrating fact of all...Stalin's mismanagement was most likely why the situation got as desperate as it did and why the Red Army was so unprepared for the invasion. Yes the consequences of these actions inflicted many disasters and injustices upon Red Army troops. Many times Generals were right to request a retreat and men accused of desertion were in fact following orders to reposition or were just lost etc. It was hard to say, so the Stalinists took no chances and as distasteful and horrifying as it was it's hard to argue that the measures the Communists took to ensure the Soviet Union's survival weren't...well...effective. 
 Stalinist measures most definitely got in the way of the war's prosecution after the first year, but crucially Stalin came around to that fact as the war went on. Though it'd be untrue to say that he had come to trust his Generals and relaxed Communist influence over the military entirely. Certainly the desperate measures of 1941 were not borne out of any strategic insight or sound military rationality. Moscow was afraid of losing control, but that's just a sign of how seriously Soviet authorities took the threat they were facing. By comparison France never took the threat it faced from Germany seriously, and look where that got us all. 
It's crucial to understand that in both Europe and Eurasia there was a great and visceral fear of a man on horseback or a military man gone self-proclaimed Dictator. Since Francisco Franco, Miklos Horthy, and Philippe Petain all became that very nightmare it's harder than one thinks to accuse the Communists of having been irrationally paranoid...
God I should go get a beer. You know you all don't need to read my crap if you don't want to lol. 

Many Armies during World War 2 were still using regimental guns or infantry guns in a direct fire role to reduce particularly strong or pesky defensive positions. Quite a few light artillery pieces had sights for direct fire too. An entire class of armored vehicle existed to get a set of tracks under a 75mm gun and carry it right up into the thick of the fighting with the infantry ie: Assault Guns. In an age of bolt action rifles and machine guns capable of reaching out 2km it seemed rather insane to actually have big artillery guns still around the frontline firing at clear targets in the Napoleonic tradition. During World War 1 short ranged guns didn't prove to be unreasonably vulnerable to infantry fire as much as counter battery fire, but a pre-war belief that the Next War would be more fluid and mobile than it actually was meant most Armies had large numbers of light field guns that just weren't powerful enough to really defeat entrenchments and were overly reliant on shrapnel and case shot which was literally useless against infantry that had dug in even lightly. Erwin Rommel's troops suffered numerous barrages from French 75mm guns firing shrapnel shot early in the war and as long as they were in foxholes casualties were almost always negligible. (According to his book) 
The sIG 33 for instance is often depicted in most games like an artillery piece...but as far as I know it was actually incapable of indirect fire and had to be laid at a target over open sights. It only had a range of around 4,500 meters so it wouldn't have been a very practical weapon for indirect fire. Generally it was expected that infantry guns would be far away enough from their target so as not to face any acute danger from return fire. However by the 1930s it was being increasingly realized that the guns and their crews were highly exposed to mortar and artillery fire so their usefulness ended up being more circumstantial than mortars would be. Mortars were just becoming increasingly better at delivering stronger and more accurate fire, and were much less vulnerable and lighter. 
Most Armies were trying to replace their cannon companies with mortars but shortages may have precluded this so it didn't always happen. As far as I can tell only the Americans were serious about maintaining their own Regimental Cannon Companies in spite of all the alternatives around...but they had a very good Regimental Gun, the 105mm M3 with an 8,000 yard range making it practical for use behind defilade. It took until the Vietnam War for the Americans to come around to the fact that what they needed for the infantry was a proper Heavy-Mortar like the 120mm mortars the Germans and Soviets had adopted but for some reason nothing too useful for that was found until the Soltam K-6. 
As far as the question for the topic goes, yes, cannons and field artillery are highly valuable in a direct attack. It'll be crucial to both screen them properly and force the enemy to divert as much of his supporting fire as he's got to other parts of the battlefield than where your guns are. This means that you should consider very high minimum ranges for them, like never closer than 800m to  a target and the farther the better. Distance is safety for the crews.... 

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. 
 

lol how many accounts and narratives of World War 2 do we all rattle off today uncritically as gospel when it's just Cold War posturing from both sides? The Anglo-Americans with their concepts of rule-by-consent and citizen-soldiers absolutely never would've been able to stomach the kinds of human losses the Soviet Union did. They'd've all more than likely ended up going the way the French did as a peace/collaborationist faction used the confusion and chaos to seize power, legitimately or not, and then seek terms with the Nazi thugs. The unfortunate truth was many leaders in Western Europe in 1940 were more worried about preserving their Armies than the states those Armies were responsible for protecting. Not only was there a visceral fear of a communist coup running in rear areas, but for many of Europe's old-fashioned Monarchist leaders the collapse of Democracy presented them with many opportunities to roll back the achievements in social progress and equality yielded throughout the industrial booms of the 19th century. With the Gestapo's thugs ready to assist in rounding up liberals and intellectuals. Churchill was certainly not that type of Leader, but if the situation was bad enough it just wouldn't be up to him anymore. He'd have ended up like Paul Reynaud, valiantly vowing to fight from the end in a prison cell he was thrown in by his own countrymen...
In the midst of crisis Paris and London consented to allowing their Generals to withdraw from understandably hopeless situations. This created a tendency for Generals to withdraw all the way to Paris and then keep right on withdrawing into the Loire or the Bordeaux...with fatal consequences for the Third Republic and even worse consequences for the Republic's many Jewish and minority citizens it was responsible for protecting. A year later the Soviet Union would tolerate no withdrawals, and told its Generals what to think...or else. Who's capital withstood the full weight of a Nazi onslaught in the end? Yes it led to many disasters, yes it led to much resentment between Stalinist authorities and its soldiers in the Red Army. The greatest disaster of them all however would be from a Nazi victory.
It's true that Lend-Lease aid wasn't really perceived on the battlefield until around late 1942 or so. However, the Russian narrative plays down the most important element of Lend-Lease aid which was not hardware, but food. When the invasion began the civilian economy nearly collapsed due to the loss of huge swathes farmland and food stocks. Soviet agriculture was barely out of a phase in it's history where a bad harvest might well lead to famine even if Stalinist authorities weren't actively manipulating food supplies just to punish recalcitrant Ukrainian nationalists. Soviet authorities couldn't hide when foreign made equipment was at the front, but what they did hide for years was the docks of Arkhangelsk spent their first year packed with vital food supplies and rations for soldiers and factories workers barely subsisting on watery soups and a foul tea made of pine-needles to ward off scurvy. The last functioning thread of the civilian economy in the dire year of 1941 was literally the food network and that is largely thanks to huge imports of food stocks from the Anglo-Americans. If the civilian economy collapsed then war production would collapse with it with catastrophic consequences for the war effort. 
Victory over the Fascist Menace was obtained through the collective effort of the Allied  powers and the coalition they assembled to triumph over it. Any one of them could've survived on their own, but precisely none of the Big 3 would've been able to achieve victory without the other 2.