Stavelot Casualties

[evilman222]

Does anyone have a rough estimate of German casualties in Stavelot on the morning of the 18th? I've seen some estimates for German armor knocked out, but nothing relating to casualties among their infantry support (who, whenever I play this scenario in the vanilla campaign or theforger's Rollbahn D campaign, tend to get annihilated because I suck at fighting in low visibility conditions)

[theforger]

+1.  Can be tricky, concentrated for fire superiority, but also dispersed, to avoid whole squads being taken out.

I often refer to @Hapless fantastic videos, I'm still learning 15 years on.

Unfortunately you don't have heavy artillery at this stage...but you do have time and a lot of follow on Panthers, Stummels, and AA from 12./Kompanie, so you can afford to be cautious, keeping casualties as low as possible before crossing the bridge. The Germans blasted their way through, quite hard to model, and not a particularly good option in CMFB.

Fortunately, the Amis for that mission don't have much in the way of supporting Arty...not the case in the later scenarios.

In regards to what happened, the Germans did suffer casualties during the 3-4 hour battle, notably Kremser the Panzer Regiments commander, and Tomhardt commander of the 11./Kompanie whom were both wounded.

From the Liebstandarte IV/2, Tiemann pg60 "each individual group of follow on Panzers and SPWs had to fight its way through Stavelot and the undiminished enemy resistance"

"there were no forces, nor any time, to suppress the infantry of these durable defenders in house to house and street combat"

[evilman222]

@theforgerI've suffered 15 dead and 10 wounded before even crossing the bridge. Most of those were lost in the first few minutes when dealing with the "contact" at the start of the scenario, which would probably be easier to deal with IRL (when you can coordinate an ambush) than in CM. Feels a bit high. The silver lining is that I think I may have suppressed the Americans a bit more than they did historically, and have knocked out a significant number of machine guns.

And yes, I'm quite fond of @Hapless videos. Lately I've had one of his longer turn-by-turn series on in the background while I'm working on stuff.

Edited December 24, 2021 by evilman222