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German Assault Rifles


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Been playing h2h and AI games and those MP44s are quite deadly. Easy to see why when asked by Hittler the Generals asked for more of em.

Fortunately Hittlers bungling with the ME-262 and forbidding assault rifles limited the damage.

Imagine CM if the 44 German squads were composed of just MP-44 and MG42 equipped troops.

Probably would make for some unbalanced battles.

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Yep; there's a reason why the primary personal weapon pretty much all armies today is a derivative of the MP44 (in inspiration if not actual engineering).

IIRC, there is a 100% MP44 squad buried somewhere in one of the German TOEs for the Market Garden module. They're downright vicious in urban fights.

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IIRC, there is a 100% MP44 squad buried somewhere in one of the German TOEs for the Market Garden module. They're downright vicious in urban fights.

Yup, they're in the MG module. Probably the closest thing to a walkover in the German campaign is the battle where you get a company armed with MP44's. If you thought British Paras shot off incredible amounts of lead, wait until you see an MP44 unit all firing at the same time.

Jyri

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Yep; there's a reason why the primary personal weapon pretty much all armies today is a derivative of the MP44 (in inspiration if not actual engineering).

IIRC, there is a 100% MP44 squad buried somewhere in one of the German TOEs for the Market Garden module. They're downright vicious in urban fights.

Yes, they are the "Sturm grenadiers", available in the Panzer Brigades mechanized infantry companies.

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Fortunately Hittlers bungling with the ME-262 and forbidding assault rifles limited the damage.

The Me 262 was designed to be a fighter-bomber long before Hitler decided to deploy them primarily at first in the ground attack role. It added maybe 2 weeks to the development process. So yes, while it was a mistake to deploy it in the jabo role, Hitler's insistence upon it being a jabo did not delay its entry into combat in any significant way.

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I hope we will get more Sturmgewehre on the eastern front as well. That will probably happen when we continue with the next module. I'm working on a scenario at the moment with a German recon company. Their armament mainly consists of rifles and now and then a MP 40, which isn't nearly enough to fight it out on close range with a Russian SMG unit. I've solved the problem by reducing each German platoon to half strength and adding a Scout team to each of them (which has 3 SMGs), but more Sturmgewehre would be a better solution.

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Begleitgrenadiers were basically tankriders. They were first used as escorts for StuGs in 1944, by 1945 these units were also added to normal Panzers. One of the more spectacular instances of this was in the Panzer Division Müncheberg, which had some of its Begleitgrenadiers equipped with nightvision scopes for their StG44s to accompany the Uhu Panthers.

In general StG44s feel a bit overrepresented in Normandy in this game. There is sparse evidence for their use in France before Autumn and Winter 1944. The Panzer Brigades that counter attacked Patton in September 1944 had a lot of them. Especially the Ardennes offensive saw mass use of the weapon as part of Volksgrenadier Divisions, who had two squads per platoon equipped entirely with them. Interestingly, the use of the MP40 declined towards the end of the war, as it was shifted out of production. Instead, oral history as well as archaelogy shows an increase in Beretta smgs in German use, produced in occupied Italy. For instance, the museum in Malmedy has two of those on display, including a mud find. The SS Kampfgruppe Westfalen that famously fought near Paderborn, the battle where General Rose was killed, was equipped with a large number of those.

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