Source for real world small action casualty rates

[warrenpeace]

While I enjoy CMBN and CMFI immensely, I feel like the casualty rates are significantly higher than in reality. I just finished playing a company sized CMFI attack battle in which I took the objective, won a total victory, but suffered 38% casualties (Too be fair, it was up a big hill with dug in defenders). 38% casualties in 2 hours seems like a lot. How often did such high rates happen in real life?

I realize that this has been discussed before, and that one reason for this is that it was rare that both sides would continue fighting in the face of high rates. Usually one side or the other would either retreat or break off the attack. However, I also wonder if the weapons modeling might be a bit over accurate as well.

I am interested is seeing what actual rates were in company and battalion size actions in Italy and France. Are there any good sources for this type of information?

[Wodin]

Make it realistic..and we would soon become bored ..units stuck behind a wall for 2 hours for instance....Only a few soldiers firing and even less hitting anything... Hit 15% casualties most likely the attack bogs down or is called off . Self preservation if modeled into a game would probably be not fun to play.

[weapon2010]

How you play can defenitley reduce casualties.For instance some players play ,slow, and methodical, using smoke and area fire effectively.Using move and quick when you should be using hunt will surely make your casualties rise.Also no matter where your men are always have them hiding and end their turn in hide.Of course there are exceptions.That being said casualties in the game are still higher than reality due to I believe 2 factors.Self preservation AI could be adjusted,maybe it could be an option to select for ultra realism?Secondly players simply just do things in the game that they would never do on a real life battlefield because their life is not at stake.

[noob]

If you want more realistic casualty levels, you need to play battles that are more realistic. This means having the battles with exit zones, that are also part of an operation. That way, you will have more than one chance to win a battle on a particular map, and you will be able to exit troops, or retreat your whole force to fight another day. Both these factors should create more realistic casualty levels.

[Childress]

Units in CM seem pretty resilient. Should a squad, average exp and average motivation, continue fighting after losing half its members? Limited to defensive fire only? Become completely unresponsive? Who knows? But, as remarked, if the answer is 'yes' to the second two questions the fun factor declines. Especially for the non-hardcore players.

[ZPB II]

It's the same thing across all genres. Atleast I don't play wargames to avoid and avert conflict at all costs. I seek conflict in order to understand and appreciate how ****ty it all was.

If I was commanding a real company in Normandy, every day I would wake up hoping there would be no enemy contact. This is the polar opposite of how a wargame should play out in my mind.

It's the same in realistic FPS games and flight sims. Planes are shot out of the sky as soon as they clear the assembly line and the body bags keep on piling. Very rarely in a game does anyone retreat.

[warrenpeace]

This site seems relevant to the discussion

http://www.22ndinfantry.org/wwii.htm

Also, for US army casualties broken down by month, theater, or division, this site is useful.

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-1.html#page45

I'd still love to see a site where you can follow a regiment or lower and look at casualties per subunit per day.

[Oddball_E8]

How you play can defenitley reduce casualties.For instance some players play ,slow, and methodical, using smoke and area fire effectively.Using move and quick when you should be using hunt will surely make your casualties rise.Also no matter where your men are always have them hiding and end their turn in hide.Of course there are exceptions.That being said casualties in the game are still higher than reality due to I believe 2 factors.Self preservation AI could be adjusted,maybe it could be an option to select for ultra realism?Secondly players simply just do things in the game that they would never do on a real life battlefield because their life is not at stake.

I rarely use Hide since it is so much more debilitating in CMx2 than it was in CMx1. If your troops are hiding they will hardly ever spot anything unless its right on top of them, and even if enemy troops start firing on them they will keep hiding.

I feel that troops are hidden enough naturally without using the hide command

[JasonC]

The average casualties for a US division in a single day of combat in the ETO ran about 25, with 50 for the highest division totals across the force.

That average includes periods of low casualties - quiet fronts, pursuit operations with no defenders opposite, etc.

Offensive operations against serious opposition, the rate for a division-day could hit 300. It practically never went above that level for any period of time. I mean, there are single outlier exceptions like 2/3rds of one division isolated early in the Bulge fighting and captured, but those are once in the whole war affairs, not anything routine. 300 a day for an infantry division pushing through the hedgerows or battering against the westwall, happened often enough to count as normal for such operations.

The IDs sustaining losses that high had 9 infantry battalions, plus an engineer battalion, attached armor, recon, artillery etc. The casualty rates in the infantry were 3 times that of the other combat arms, but they were not zero in the other arms, and there are a lot of men in those other categories. The infantry battalion losses run 67-75% of the overall total. In the armor divisions, there are fewer AIBs; casualties per division day are lower, but most of the losses are still concentrated on the AIBs.

This means a typical US infantry battalion in heavy combat, with an attack role, might lose 25 men in a day. Vs. a whole war average, all operation types and tempos, of that much per division day.

CM players lose that much from each of their engaged companies in less than an hour and don't bat an eyelash. Our historical counterparts definitely did not mash their forces into the enemy that recklessly.

Losses go higher on some other fronts and periods - 500 men lost in a day of heavy combat happens in the east, for example, both in Russian formations and sometimes in German ones. They stay within a factor of 2 of the US figure given above - 50 per battalion per day at the outside extreme of "bloody", in other words.

Units taking losses at anything like those rates - 25-50 per battalion per day - need a strong replacement stream reaching them continually to remain combat effective. They burn out on a time scale of a few weeks otherwise, and a month of such action will wreck a formation even if it is receiving replacements, requiring a spell off the line to refit and train new men etc.

The number of occasions over the entire war in which possession of a specific territorial objective mattered more than losses, to justify anything like the scale of losses we routinely incur in CM fighting, can be counted on one hand. Critical passages in breakthrough fighting, that could seal the encirclement fate of whole army groups or avoid the same - about it.

[Michael Emrys]

If you want more realistic casualty levels, you need to play battles that are more realistic. This means having the battles with exit zones, that are also part of an operation. That way, you will have more than one chance to win a battle on a particular map, and you will be able to exit troops, or retreat your whole force to fight another day. Both these factors should create more realistic casualty levels.

There is another thing. Most scenarios are set up so that each player has an equal chance (or as close to it as can be made) to win. In real combat, in situations like that, casualties tend to rise sharply as neither side wants to quit as long as it has a chance. In real combat, the attacker tries to have such an overwhelming superiority that that does not happen. Ideally, the defender should be overrun almost before he knows an attack is underway. Needless to say, that ideal is very, very seldom realized. But the point is that often enough it becomes fairly clear who is going to prevail and the losing side either runs out of steam or pulls up stakes and retires to new positions. Sure, last ditch fights to the death happened, but they weren't the norm as they are in CM.

Would we want to change that? Based on the posts I have seen in this forum, I'd have to say that a very large majority would not. But the beauty of CM is that you can make your own battles and weight them any way you want. You can also play with an informal rule that if you take more than a certain percentage of casualties, you will either break off the attack or if defending will bug out (at present that means offer a surrender [unless you are playing on a really large map that allows withdrawal to secondary positions]).

Michael

[warrenpeace]

Jason:

Given your analysis, is it that CM's lethality is too great, or simply that players and AI are too aggressive. My hunch is that it is mostly the latter, but I do think the former might also be true as well.

On a related question, do rattled troops fire less accurately than ok ones?

[Bil Hardenberger]

Jason did state that these were averages... so most days a Division would take no casualties (while resting), while in heavy combat they would take much more than 25 a day.

[db_zero]

If we got h2h campaigns where losses carried over and replacements green and random, you'd see changes in the way players approach battles.

Ironman also tends to change things. Even against the AI, I use far more targeting of places where I think the enemy might be, even if I don't have positive targets. I think lower difficulties give players too much information.

I've read in the past that green troops who were trained at boot camp had to be retrained by vets to forgrt what they were taught in boot camp about precision fire at spotted targets and to just shoot at at any suspected position where the enemy might be.

[JasonC]

Bil - divisions yes, but battalions took 25 to 50 per day in the heaviest fighting of the war. 25 for US divisions in the push to St Lo period, for example. 50 per battalion day is the sort of thing attacking formations experienced at Kursk. So those per battalion day numbers are not for mixed periods, they are the heaviest fighting there was.

As for warrenpeace's question, I think morale in CM is systematically too high, and that green troops are much more realistic for the typical behavior of real troops than any of the higher quality levels CM provides. Players exploit that stiffer than realistic morale to shove their forces together harder than they actually did, which is partly a matter of scenario incentives and such. But at bottom, the game gives us men who are too brave, and we abuse it to get more of them killed.

Besides playing with green troops (and not too many leadership bonuses etc), I have two additional suggestions for more realistic fighting. One, scenario designers should go easy on the flag objectives, using only modest numbers of the lower value ones, or balance those out across the field, instead of putting a huge value-portion worth in the defense backfield, only. Too much in points in flags, and those clumped in winner take all fashion instead of distributed about the field in a way expected to break roughly evenly between the two sides, encourages reckless behavior with the men. When the flags are less important and more nearly balanced, overly expensive "victories" are duly penalized.

It is still possible - indeed, likely, the normal thing etc - for the commanders to push too hard and get away with it by wracking up knock out points to match their own losses. So changed VCs alone without bravery dialed down is not a solution. But it is part of a solution.

The next thing I recommend is to set break off levels low. My preference is to force a side to offer ceasefire if it falls below a threshold global morale level or a loss tolerance level, then to set those lower on both sides. This means any fight that causes very heavy losses to both sides will be broken off in mutual exhaustion, when both sides are forced to offer ceasefire. It also means if one side hits its loss level before the other, the other can call the fight if they are happy with their relative position and likely score.

That rewards careful play and does so in a realistic manner and for realistic reasons.

A last item is less important than the above - scenario designers should go easy on the extra ammo and uber weaponry. Forces should be able to fight with basic loads - if they need 3 times the ammo they are probably firing way too much and getting way too many people killed, in both directions. Very large artillery should be limited in shell count. Turn down the uber tanks by whole companies and the like. As an occasional thing those may be of interest, though even in that score I firmly believe "less is more" - having to handle 1-2 Tigers in a rare scenario appearance is tactically challenging and fun, having to fight 8 of the things or seeing them in every other fight is just silly and broken.

To sum up - designers go easy on flags and divided them around the field, keep ammo to basic loads and troops to green as a standard quality level. Then have low breakoff thresholds of required ceasefire offers below a modest loss limit.

Do those things and I don't think the typical lethality of CM fire is too far off. The one bit of the game engine itself I could see tweaking is slowing down the recovery from suppression / slower rally. It would produce more realistic fighting if rally were half as fast as it is right now. You can get some of that from greens, to be sure.

I understand why the designers picked the levels of troop robustness they did - players like to feel in command of their forces and expect them to normally respond to commands promptly etc. But we should all recognize that the player expectation there has beefed up our pixeltruppen into little Siegfrieds, and the real men who lived or died by what happened in the next 60 seconds were never as reckless as we are.

[db_zero]

I think the fact that most people play on difficulties that give far too much info that allow far too precise targeting. Alot of ammo was spent to generate each casualty and alot of fire was directed randomly.

A very realstic game would probably appeal to an even smaller crowd and as previous poster said may not be very enjoyable.

[Apocal]

I'm thinking much of the reason for forces being forcibly crunched together like a car collision is that a CMx2 player is probably playing a one-off scenario or MP quick battle, whereas in the real deal that wasn't nearly the case. These dudes had to fight tomorrow and the day after and probably a week later with the forces that made it through the previous fights.

Certainly would offer a counter-incentive to "must win every battle, no matter how insignificant the objective."

[db_zero]

I'm sure its been asked many times, but h2h campaigns would really add a welcome element. Throw in some of the requested no cheat Ironman mode and you would see a far more conservative style of play.

Imagine taking green troops from Normandy that became hardened vets in later campaigns and knowing that any losses would be replaced by green troops or replacements. Fighting h2h in one off battles is an all or nothing proposition and the fights will gravitate to that sort of mentality.

I'm thinking much of the reason for forces being forcibly crunched together like a car collision is that a CMx2 player is probably playing a one-off scenario or MP quick battle, whereas in the real deal that wasn't nearly the case. These dudes had to fight tomorrow and the day after and probably a week later with the forces that made it through the previous fights.

Certainly would offer a counter-incentive to "must win every battle, no matter how insignificant the objective."

[Childress]

A very realistic game would probably appeal to an even smaller crowd and as previous poster said may not be very enjoyable.

On reflection, that smaller crowd probably includes every poster on this forum. Viz the machine gun controversy: 'more punitive! more suppression! Make it harder!'. That's why we buy CM games, right? Hold the spritizers. Give it to us neat.

[db_zero]

That may be true, but if you're going to do one thing like tweak MG's then wouldn't you would have to accommodate the flip side and making tweaks to things such as going to cover and other factors that from reading other threads is not possible with the current game engine?

Don't get me wrong I would like to see a ball busting "realistic mode" as a play option.

Its easy for us to ask/demand, but I don't know if I'd want to be the programmer/designer who has to deliver the pizza with everything on it.

I deal with that cr*p everyday. End users and others asking for the world on a silver platter and then wondering why rubbing the magic genie bottle and asking for 3 wishes doesn't produce results.

That smaller crowd probably includes every poster on this forum. Viz the machine gun controversy: 'more punitive! more suppression! Make it harder!'.

[Childress]

I edited my post. The CM buyer who wants a more forgiving and easy going sim is as mythical as the unicorn, imo. From JasonC on down.

[John Kettler]

warrenpeace,

I understand your concern, but I believe there are multiple factors at work inflating perceived lethality: self-preservation AI modeling limits, small intersoldier intervals (though men do herd under fire, as numerous pics show), thus magnifying effectiveness of fire on men whether on the move, sitting or prone; lack of terrain microrelief modeling (denying infantry cover it really had), lack of proper cover for units in rocky terrain (the kind with boulders), much greater situational awareness, resulting in a concomitant ability to bring devastating fire on the foe far faster and way more accurately (remember my harping on a early 80s 300m own location error for U.S. Army FOs?) than was historically possible, thus increasing lethality per unit time. These are by no means all the factors. Also, as BFC has said time and again, the game really represents the nastiest part of the battle.

The above said, I vividly recall a Letter to the Editor at AH's mag, THE GENERAL. The Editor received a scathing comparison of the actual B-17 loss rates as opposed to those modeled in B-17: Queen of the Skies. The response was telling. The gist of it lay in the (fatal) impact using the actual figures would have on gameplay, thus, player interest.

Thrill to: bomber attempts to start, bomber attempts takeoff, succeeds or doesn't, attempts to formate, drones across Channel (various abort possibilities), draws flak and fighters, etc. As the saga of the Memphis Belle indicates, at that stage of the war, getting through 25 missions was quite an accomplishment, but that certainly wasn't true when we got our various fighter acts together, started clobbering the Luftwaffe, then ran wild on the backs of the earlier work of the P-47s and P-38s once the P-51 arrived on the scene. Those B-17 crews were on a picnic by comparison.

As JasonC rightly notes in a macro sense, average casualties are cold consolation when, say, 18 Platoon, under my command, walks right into burp gun and MG-42 perdition, with almost every man a casualty in about two minutes. The PBI (line infantry), even in an infantry division, forms a relatively small portion of the total division, but it's the PBI that takes most of the casualties on the sharp end, and that's what CM models.

This is horrifyingly depicted in the experience of the Hallamshire Battalion in Normandy, where the seemingly insignificant wastage at the JasonC divisional level of aggregation becomes the ongoing flensing of unit fighting power and cohesion, with officers taking terrible lumps by nature of their jobs. Recommend you start with the second phase of Fontenay-le-Pensel, then go into the Battle of Vendee in order to see how the shift from more or less defense in place to attacking changes the numbers. On a single day, the Hallamshires took more casualties than did JasonC's typical division.

http://www.irdp.co.uk/JohnCrook/normandy.htm

Imagine the "fun" of a realistic CM D-Day scenario in which depleted, morale shaken (casualties and such before landing) American units start on the shores of Omaha Beach, then spend most of the day under German MG, mortar, rifle and artillery fire. Bet that'll get a lot of takers! Barring a direct artillery hit, what the American player would experience would be ~8 hours of ever increasing troop and equipment losses. Realistic (within limits)? Yes! Fun? Unless the player's a masochist, no!

I agree that we virtual commanders are entirely too casual in throwing our men into the teeth of enemy fire. Playing operations penalizes such behavior, but nothing I've seen does it quite as well as the Nabla System our esteemed Greg Nabla came up with. All you need is a pool of players for both sides of any scenario you fancy, however imbalanced. You may get your head handed to you on a veritable suicide mission, but if you do better than the others playing that same side, you are top dog for that scenario. Nothing but nothing I've encountered so motivated the players to use their men the way a rational commander would. The Nabla System rewards careful use of troops and equipment, provides strong incentives for force preservation and can and does cause commanders to break off failed attacks and evacuate everyone and everything who/which can be saved.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=52944

Back in CMx1's CMBO, we got to bite our nails when trying to evacuate as many units as possible without triggering Auto Surrender, an exercise tied to the merciless Morale Level meter.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Apocal]

On reflection, that smaller crowd probably includes every poster on this forum. Viz the machine gun controversy: 'more punitive! more suppression! Make it harder!'.

Well the MG thread wasn't about difficulty per se, MGs before the current iteration just flat weren't doing the job they were supposed to do.

I edited my post. The CM buyer who wants a more forgiving and easy going sim is as mythical as the unicorn, imo. From JasonC on down.

I wouldn't say that's true. A lot of friends I talked into trying Combat Mission have since moved onto WALB. WALB has nowhere near the fidelity of CMx2, but its pretty good as a beer and pretzels wargame, certainly more realistic than a lot of stuff from the eighties and nineties that's considered classic today.

[Michael Emrys]

WALB?

Michael

[JasonC]

"A lot of ammo was spent to generate each casualty and a lot of fire was directed randomly"

True. However, the men were also firing much, much less than we typically do in CM. A basic ammo load for a US rifleman was 80 rounds of 30-06. Occasional they would have another 48 rounds in a bandolier, on top of that. In combat they got 2 such loads or 256 rounds of ammo tops, in a typical --- week.

The load for a BAR man was 240 rounds, for an M-1 carbine 150.

With everything he was issued, the basic load for a rifleman, with allowance for only one bandolier, comes to 82 pounds. So before you go on about all the extra ammo they would naturally carry, strap that on and go walk 20 miles a day for a week, then get back to us. (A BAR gunner's load was 99 pounds). Sure, in combat they would drop packs. They still had to carry all the extra ammo you want them to have, with their regular gear, to the spot where they did so. Some of them had to walk from eastern Poland to southern Russian and back, carrying loads like that the entire time. Infantrymen were first of all pack-mules.

So yes you are correct, most of the rounds fired didn't remotely hit anything, and most of them were fired when the shooter could even particularly see anything. But they also were not remotely pulling triggers all day. It is not like the lack of a need to have a clear visible target meant every squad was area firing at every shrub from minute 4 to minute 50 of your private little firefight, or the half of it when his element wasn't moving.

They didn't have the ammo for it and they were not about to expose themselves that much, either. Firing in combat gives away your position; unless you know the enemy already knows that position or you've got a great target, that is a pretty strong incentive to keep the bullets where they are.

The average rifleman didn't hit anything in the whole war, let alone in every firefight. Artillery did most of the killing and wounding, major weapon system vehicles (tanks and airplanes etc) and machineguns did most of the rest. In the armies fighting longest an average soldier might make it through being a casualty twice at most before he was out of it; for later comers like the Americans the poor bloody infantry turned over only once, and the other branches mostly (i.e. well above half) went through the whole war without a scratch.

Everyone can't be above average, and if the average rifleman hit anything in the average day of combat, the war would have been over in about 3 days...

Why were they shooting so much less frequently than we are, and with less average effect? Simple, they were staying farther away from each other a lot of the time, and respecting the danger the enemy presented, and getting out of the way where that danger was too high. Much more readily than we do. Only small "crusts" of forces on either side were brushing close enough to each other to exchange lethal fire. Main bodies spent the bulk of the time out of range of any of their opposite number. Or at most, mopped up through what was left of such a thin crust, occasionally, if those hadn't skedaddled by the time said main body arrived.

Then there is the way the infantry actually reacted to the enemy just playing trumps, often as not. A 105 barrage comes down and what do we do? Tell the men to hide and maneuver a reserve for whatever we expect to follow it up 30 seconds behind it while the action movie special effects are still echoing. What did they do instead, quite often? Pull back half a mile, breaking contact completely, dig in somewhere else and lick their wounds. While the follow up might be a tentative probe 30 minutes later that slowly figured out the coast was clear, followed by nervous occupation of the previous enemy position, and a lot of reporting what happened to fourteen tiers of important muckety mucks for half the afternoon.

Battle is sheer confusion, and men aren't actually eager to die. So everything slows down, the simplest things take time.

[Apocal]

WALB?

Wargame: AirLand Battle.