dbsapp
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Posts posted by dbsapp
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To give you the real reason why Barbarossa failed - and to end this nonsense about potential uprising of Soviet people - I will give you some quotes from German sources from the first weeks of war:
Yet, in spite of its success, the panzer group’s war diary includes the observation:
Where the enemy appears he f i ghts tenaciously and courageously to the death.
Defectors and those seeking to surrender were not reported from any positions.
The struggle, as a result, will be harder than those in Poland and the Western campaign.
In similar fashion the commander of the XXXXIII Army Corps in Kluge’s 4th Army, General of Infantry Gotthard Heinrici, wrote home to his family on 24 June that the Soviet solder fought ‘very hard’. Heinrici then concluded: ‘He is a much better soldier than the Frenchman.
Extremely tough, devious and deceitful.’
As Bock noted for 24 June:
The Russians are defending themselves desperately; heavy counterattacks near Grodno against the VIII and XX Army Corps; Panzer Group Guderian is also being held up near Slonim by enemy counterattacks.
ne regiment of the division was assigned to assault the Soviet defences which resulted in a tenacious three-day battle. The company commander’s battalion alone suffered 150 casualties. In another infantry division from 4th Army, Lieutenant Georg Kreuter noted on 25 June: ‘We cannot move forward, everywhere there are small battles. Above all at night. .. Very close to me four off i cers have fallen. They will soon be buried together with other comrades in the town [Ozgmowicz]. Under no circumstances can this continue!!’
The following account comes from Colonel Erhard Raus of the neigh-bouring battle group:
It was not so much the numerical superiority of the enemy which made the situation precarious for our command and troops, but the totally unexpected appearance of colossal tanks for which German tanks and anti-tank weapons appeared to be no match. ..Even the concentrated fire of the artillery and all other heavy weapons of the Kampfgruppe [Battle Group] was not able to keep off the steel pachyderms. Though enveloped in fire and smoke, they immediately started attacking and crushed every thing in their paths. Untroubled by the shower of heavy howitzer shells and earth falling down upon them, they attacked road block 121 in spite of the f l anking firee of the anti-tank guns from the wooded areas, rolled over the anti-tank guns dug in there and broke into the artillery area.
About one hundred friendly tanks, one-third of them were Panzer IVs, now assembled for a counterattack. Some of them faced the enemy in front, but the bulk made an assault from the f l anks. From three sides, their shells hammered against the steel giants, but the effort to destroy them was in vain. On the other hand, very soon we had casualties ourselves.
. On 26 June Halder stated in his diary ‘Army Group South is advancing slowly, unfortunately with considerable losses.’
The Operations Off i cer at OKH responsible for Army Group South further noted: ‘Russians are standing their ground excellently;
down here there is exceptionally systematic command.’
Following the war from his off i ce in Berlin, Goebbels noted in his diary:
‘The f i rst big pocket is beginning to close...But they are f i ghting well and have learned a great deal even since Sunday.’76At the front, a liaison off i cer from Panzer Group 3 visiting the 20th Panzer Division reported:
‘Of the enemy there exists the impression that his infantry is many times numerically superior and very good to the bitter end. Colonel von Bis-mark used the expression “fantastic”.’
Already on 26 June Ernst-G¨ unter Merten, a soldier in 4th Army, noted the diff i culty of f i ghting in the densely wooded terrain.
These bloody Russian forests! One loses the overview of who is a friend and who isanenemy.Soweareshootingatourselves. ..TheIIcompanywasencircledand came back with 55 men. ‘Worse than at Verdun!’ said Lieutenant-Colonel von L¨ ohneysen.
h). Yet Hoth’s commentary on the motivation of enemy soldiers was equally enlightening and, if accu-rate, constituted a decidedly adverse development for the Germans. ‘The Russian soldier’, Hoth judged, ‘f i ghts not out of fear, rather idea. He does not want to return to the tsarist time.’
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2 minutes ago, Phantom Captain said:
Haha! Love it!
Speaking of rounds going through things... At Marborn, I think it was my 6th battle of the US campaign. I had one of my M60A3s take a shot at about 1800m at a Soviet tank that turned out to be a T-80. I hit the tank and lo and behold, a second column of smoke appeared behind it. Zooming in on the destroyed tank I could see where the round went through the side hull of the tank and come out the other side, hitting a BTR behind it and killing that two.
Two birds stoned at once and all that. :))
I had a game where 3 of my BTRs were pierced by one diagonal shot from M60.
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21 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:
Jokes aside, what does this mean?
Genuinely curious given that he died in a car accident which doesn't seem too related to any amounts of rudeness or honesty
That was Stalin's spies job, you don't understand.
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1 minute ago, The_Capt said:
Correct me if I am wrong but at least some of these look like they from Alsfeld.
The second one. They are the mix of Soviet and American campaigns.
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13 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:
To an individual who thinks God could be on the side of the NKWD and who believes the words of Molotov, the Soviet equivelant of Ribbentrop, about occupying other countries, yes.
All these books are well recieved by reviewers from normal newspapers and magazines, available in normal book stores (although not in Russia probably) and respectable, so say what you like. It will help me to make your medical AND political diagnosis.
Nothing is permitted to enter through iron curtain except books about God giving blessings to NKVD. Those who dare to smuggle literature on sufferings in Singapore end their days in GULAG.
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6 hours ago, Aragorn2002 said:
Stalin's secret agents by Stanton Evans or Among the Dead Cities by Grayling for example. Or The Road less Traveled by Zelikow, Stalin's War by McMeekin, The Web of Disinformation by Martin, The Venona Secrets by Romerstein, Operation Snow by Pavlov and so many other 'revisionist' books?
This list sounds like medical diagnosis.
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24 minutes ago, AlexUK said:
At the moment I'm not playing CW much on my mac book air m1 because the big scenarios do not run well (loss of terrain features at distance), so I am looking forward to anything that will allow the game to run better. Native apple silicon code would obviously be great too (one can dream....).
Apple users should stay at purgatory until all of their files not scanned by benevolent AI (for your safety only).
Also the absence of the answer is an answer too.
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"There’s still a lot of life left in CM2, so we’re not ceasing development on it, but we are keeping our own expectations more modest than we have in the past".
Doesn't sound like there will be CM3 engine anytime soon.
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Yesterday I completed the first mission of US campaign. After Soviet campaign It felt like chatting with human being after cruel experiments at alien flying saucer.
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56 minutes ago, Phantom Captain said:
I finished the US campaign with a Minor Victory! I'm pretty happy with it and felt overall I did really well!
We fought on the opposite sides, but I salute you lol
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1 minute ago, Aragorn2002 said:
I don't like Churchill either. I think Chamberlain had a lot more decency. But a lot less luck.
Chamberlain was all along in favor of alliance with Hitler and never hid the sympathy for mad Andy, so I'm not surprised.
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26 minutes ago, Erwin said:
Am not a historian, but my understanding is that it was only Churchill who was warning about the rise of Germany through the 20's and 30's when he was essentially in exile and laughed at, his "dark dog days". Whatever was done by Chamberlain and any other towards the end of the 30's was largely due to the acknowledgement that Churchill was correct in his warnings. Churchill had been on the "outs" and disregarded for most of the previous years. It was an acknowledgement of that his proposed policies had been right for the previous 15+ years that made him PM instead of Halifax.
Churchill was also the main guy who warned about Stalin and how he could not be trusted all through WW2 - but the naive Roosevelt bought Stalin's promises. It was fortunate for Roosevelt's legacy that he died at the end of WW2 otherwise we would be re-evaluating his delusions about Stalin which helped the USSR to take over most of Eastern and some of Central Europe.
Lets put it in this way: this understanding is rather far from reality.
This thread is called "Book Recommendations", so I will follow the thread's name.
If you are interested in what actually happened in 30s and why it all became what it became I highly recommend to read:
"1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II" by Michael Jabara Carley.
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48 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:
Yeah, that's pretty clear. For Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania etc only the last option remained. As Molotov must have thought during 1970s interview.
If you don't like Molotov I can quote Churchill on the subject of his pact with Ribbentrop:
"What is the second event of this first month? It is, of course, the assertion of the power of Russia. Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.
At any rate the line is there, and an Eastern Front has been created which Nazi Germany does not dare assail. When Herr von Ribbentrop [German Foreign Minister] was summoned to Moscow last week, it was to learn the fact, and to accept the fact, that the Nazi designs upon the Baltic states and upon the Ukraine must come to a dead stop.
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a middle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest or safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan states and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of Southeastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life interests of Russia.
But here these interests of Russia fall into the same channel as the interests of Britain and France. None of these three powers can afford to see Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and above all Turkey, put under the German heel".
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1 hour ago, Bufo said:
- Friendly vehicles never block LOS/LOF for other friendly vehicles.
- Operable enemy vehicles block LOF, but not LOS, from friendly vehicles.
- Non-smoking KO'd vehicles do not block LOS/LOF for friendly or enemy vehicles.
- Non-smoking KO'd vehicles block LOF, but not LOS, from any unit as long as the targeted unit is not a vehicle (ie: tank shooting at infantry or infantry shooting at infantry)
- Smoking vehicles block LOS and LOF.
- "Vehicles" means tanks, SP guns, and AT/Anti-personnel guns.
What's that - official designe notes or list of bugs found by players?
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2 hours ago, Aragorn2002 said:
Not sure what you mean by so-called occupation. Are you by any chance Russian? The Russian attack on Poland was part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Stalin was smart enough to wait until the Germans had done most of the fighting.
In this regard I've made myself clear already:
2 hours ago, dbsapp said:"occupation" of Poland began only on 17 of September, when Poland as a state ceased to exist. There were basically 2 options: either leave the territory to Hitler, or take it yourself (as Molotov rightly pointed out in 1970s interview)
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2 hours ago, Aragorn2002 said:
After 1937 Chamberlain made sure the British military at least partly recovered from years of neglect in a time that most left wing politicians were against his policy of appeasement, but also against spending more money on arms. No Spitfires without Chamberlain.
No politician did more to delay the commitment to send a British expeditionary force to the continent than Neville Chamberlain, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. There was no Ministry of Defence in the 1930s, and policy was laid down by the Cabinet after discussions by ministers in Cabinet committees or in the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), which brought together ministers and the professional heads of the armed forces (the Chiefs of Staff) and senior civil servants. It was Chamberlain who persuaded the Cabinet in 1934 to give a lower priority to the army than to the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was he who initiated a review of the defence departments’ programmes that resulted in a Cabinet decision at the end of 1937 that the army’s first priority should be the air defence of Great Britain, and that the expeditionary force, or field force, as it was then known, should be equipped on a scale sufficient only for operations in defence of British territories and interests outside Europe.
In fact, from the early 1930s, British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Depression-afflicted economy, fought to keep military spending to a minimum. They then used the country’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament, a flagrant violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. Although Britain’s appeasement toward Germany began before Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937, he was its high priest throughout. As chancellor of the Exchequer for most of the 1930s, he oversaw the government’s strict budgetary limits on rearmament. According to one associate, Chamberlain, a former businessman who had spent two years as mayor of Birmingham, thought of Europe as simply “a bigger Birmingham.”
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1 hour ago, Aragorn2002 said:
Until 1937 few people saw the necessity of rearming, since Germany wasn't a threat in any way.
Obviously, it's not true. British cabinet, as the rest of the European governments, perceived Hitler's Germany as a threat since 1933.
In 1933 Germany announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference.
As early as Nov 1933 - Feb 1934 British Defense Requirements Subcommittee identified Nazi Germany as the principal threat to British national security.
In 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed that premised Nazis to substantially increase their sea power.
In 1936 the remilitarization of the Rhineland occurred that de facto cancelled Versailles agreements.
In 1936 the Spanish civil war began and Hitler quickly sent his troops their.
The British Cabinet was very concerned by Hitler’s rise to power, which they understood as a threat to European security and likely to lead to war in the foreseeable future. In late February 1933, reflecting on the possibility that Hitler would be able to consolidate Nazi rule in Germany, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir John Simon expressed the fear that “[Hitler’s] militant, very dangerous and incompetent administration will remain in charge of the centre of Europe in strict training for mischief.” In particular, he feared that the consequences would be “…an atmosphere of hostility, if not hostilities, which will militate with full force against the financial and economic recovery which is essential not only to peace but to the very existence of civilization".
So it's quite clear that Germany was a threat in any possible way long before 1937.
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51 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:
In my experience lots of books on ww2 are for the most part opinions and to a lesser degree based on new historical research, but I know what you mean. What I do like about Hitchen is his fresh, revisionist approach. While still reading his book I'm fascinated by his conclusions and hardly can put it down, which doesn't happen often to me. One example is his analysis of the British promise in 1939 to the Poles to defend Poland (itself territorially aggressive, despotic and very anti-semitic, even during the war the Poles in exile in London tried to get rid of the jews after the war) in case of an enemy attack. That promise was strictly aimed at Germany as was described in a secret protocol. When the Poles asked the British for help against the invading Russians in 1939, they were pointed to that secret protocol. Another known, but unpopular fact is that Chamberlain did much more to save Britiain, by building up the neglected British armed forces between 1937 and 1939, than all the Britisch pacifists, communists and socialists combined. Hitchen doesn't claim to bring new facts, but he sure gives us a lot to think about. Highly recommended.
The main target of Hitchen's critique is the so called guarantees to Poland, that Britain de facto couldn't fullfil. He writes that British policy in this reagard "was a great folly. It prevented us from getting Soviet cooperation at a far lower price than the one we eventually paid for it".
When exiled Polish government asked for help against USSR, it was a plain absurd, as everything that this government had done before it. Even failed British realized it could be stupidiest move ever (just imagine consequences of Britain declaring war on Russia in 1939).
Besides, the so called Russian "occupation" of Poland began only on 17 of September, when Poland as a state ceased to exist. There were basically 2 options: either leave the territory to Hitler, or take it yourself (as Molotov rightly pointed out in 1970s interview).
As for the Chamberlain, I don't really remember what Hitchens says about his relations with the armed forces. But what I do recall from other sources is that it was Chamberlain who was Chancellor of the Exchequer since the beginning of 1930s and it was him who for all this time denied the proper funding of British military, including RAF.
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I've read "Phony Victory", it's quite entertaining and well written, as always the case with Peter Hitchens. It's not a historical research per se, but more like a long essay on the decline and fall of British empire. For me the most valuable part is Hitchens's reflection on the the image of WW2 in British collective memory. While it's generally perceived as yet another English triumph, he argues, in fact it was a colossal disaster for the Empire that resulted in Britain becoming a second rate power. Hitchens notes, that neither Britain played a major role in WW2, nor it came out victorious from the conflict, despite what popular sentiment says. The text is full of resentment towards US that basically substituted bankrupt Britain as the world hegemon. It also have some kind words for Chamberlain, I recall, and some critics of overinflated - in Hitchens's view - image of Churchill. The large portion of the book is the condemnation of British areal bombardments of German cities with harsh rebuke addressed to Arthur Harris.
You may, or may not, agree with "Phony Victory" - once again, it's more like an opinion and essay - but between two brothers I always preferred Peter to Christopher.
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Militaty life 1940s: average life expectancy at battlefield is 4 minutes
Military life in 2020s: playing Combat mission at least 4 hours a day
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12 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:
So, if you're in the mood to try and guess other features a good place to start would be to think along the lines of what the military would need to get the most out of the game for training and experimentation.
Hmm... "How to conceal civilian casualties?"
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48 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Wow….all I can say. I think you are the first person to finish the entire Soviet Campaign (at least that I have seen).
I serve the Soviet Union!
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4 minutes ago, StieliAlpha said:
Oh, you are very welcome, my friend.
I just wanted to understand your otherwise incomprehensible statement and, of course, always enjoy a good discussion.
We did not have one? Don‘t worry, that’s ok. It is currently quite trendy to avoid arguments but rather stick your believes.
I remember this quote of Oscar Wilde from the billboard of my favorite Irish pub, that was closed several years ago: "Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing".
Operation Barbarossa Ever Winnable?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
In 640 CE the Ukranians captured Alexandria after a long siege. According to the story, the conquering Ukranians heard about a magnificent library containing all the knowledge of the world and were anxious to see it. But the Getman, unmoved by this vast collection of learning, apparently stated 'they will either contradict the "BLOODLANDS", in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.'
The manuscripts were then gathered together and used as fuel for the 4,000 bathhouses in the city. In fact there were so many scrolls that they kept the bathhouses of Alexandria heated for six months.