Vilnius Circa 13 July 1944

[Combatintman]

This thread is both an announcement and a plea for assistance ... so here goes.

I am knocking together a potentially large mission based on the breakout of Gruppe Tolsdorf in July 1944 in the vicinity of Vilnius.

The start point of my research was an account of the action in Hans-Jochim Jung's book 'History of Panzer Regiment Grossdeutschland' (pages 284-285 refer).

I've looked at the place on Google Earth and grabbed the contemporary 1:100,000 map and have the basis of a map using the special editor overlay. In terms of the basis of the map (which is just over 4k x 4k), I'm well on the way with it but still have a bucket load of work to do on it.

Like I said the battle will be large involving as a minimum on the German side:

1st battalion, Panzer Regiment Grossdeutschland.

1st battalion, Panzergrenadier Regiment 14.

Gruppe Tolsdorf.

So here goes the plea for assistance ...

What was the identity and strength of the Soviet force?

What formation was Gruppe Tolsdorf from and what was the strength of the organisation.

Whilst knowing the above is not a showstopper, because I have an idea as to how I want this to play out, the more detail the better is my preferred option.

As to how this will pan out, it will be a German player versus the AI scenario and will involve rescuing an encircled force with some bells and whistles.

Thanks in anticipation.

[Lille Fiskerby]

This sounds great Combatintman.

The information I have on Tolsdorf is that he was CO of the I./22 Füssilier Regiment

in july 44 and later in the war he would command the 340 Volksgrenadier Division.

You can try this page :

http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Personenregister/TolsdorffT.htm

[Combatintman]

This sounds great Combatintman.

The information I have on Tolsdorf is that he was CO of the I./22 Füssilier Regiment

in july 44 and later in the war he would command the 340 Volksgrenadier Division.

You can try this page :

http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Personenregister/TolsdorffT.htm

Brilliant - thanks mate, just the sort of stuff I'm after.

[Terkin]

Regarding Germans, you can try reading these threads: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=105600&start=0

http://www.feldgrau.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=6370

Battlegroup Tolsdorf most likely consisted from 1067th Grenadier regiment, who were reinforced with elements of 16th Fallschirmjager regiment. Some of them were airlifted to airport in the South of the city, others were airdropped several days later (these were the ones who reinforced Tolsdorf).

Regarding Soviet side:

Vilnius was taken by forces of 3rd Byelorussian front. The battle for Vilnius itself was fought by 5th Army, 5th Guards tank army, 3rd Mechanized Corps

Soviet forces:

277th, 215th, 144th, 371st, 97th, 184th Infantry divisions

153rd, 35th, 25th, 31rd, 32nd, 3rd, 18th, 19th Tank brigades

954th, 1510th, 1823rd, 1446th, 1436th, 1496th SPG regiments

3rd Breakthrough artillery division

7th, 8th, 9th Mechanized brigades

53rd, 2nd Motorized infantry divisions

4th Assault engineer brigade (ШИСБр)

1223rd Light SPG regiment

376th Heavy SPG regiment

Part of 2nd tank brigade

[Combatintman]

Terkin - well that seems to have closed the other half of the question off. I think I have more than enough to be going on with. Thanks for your help!!

[Fizou]

Looking forward to this Combatintman!

[MikeyD]

You might want to consider building a larger-than-needed map that you could then subdivide into discrete overlapping battles... or QB maps.

[Combatintman]

MikeyD - the map is maxed out and I need all of it to achieve the desired effect.

I want to make the player to have to make some pretty big calls. The battle itself was an encircled German remnant group which then got some more remnants and was holed up in a perimeter waiting to the be rescued by the 6th Panzer Division.

The sort of choices the player will be forced to make will be:

When and what proportion of the encircled force is used to link up with the retreating remnants.

How best to defend the pocket.

How does the 6th Panzer Division break into the pocket.

At what point do they all extract.

I plan to tee this up by allocating target objectives to certain Soviet formations, creating balanced exit VPs and the use of about 3-4 Soviet AI plans. All of which will force the encircled force to defend.

There will be a fair whack of concurrent activity going on throughout but that is the part that will need to be given the most thought in terms of both processing power and generating the right problem set for the German player.

I could break it into a mini campaign but it wouldn't create the same tension.

Regards

[Combatintman]

Thanks to the pointers above I've found some more stuff out. Theodor Tolsdorff was a vaguely famous individual and was decorated and promoted for his actions during this battle.

What started out as a hunt around for an action that I could vaguely recreate and for which I had discovered mapping is turning out to be an interesting little project. Thanks again for your help in tracking down some of the detail. They have enabled me to go straight to the right pages in some of my books without spending endless hours trawling through various sources.

Here are the relevant wiki entries for those interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius_Offensive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Tolsdorff