History tidbits

[JasonC]

This is a post about a grab bag of small history items I've come across reading eastern front stuff recently, that haven't entered main discussions on other threads. I welcome comments on the specific topics I address, and also anyone else's version of the same sort of observation. Just to be clear, though, this is a thread about things people have seen in the histories - that perhaps should be in CMBB or in scenarios - not about things seen in CMBB games. (Get your own AAR thread for the opposite lol).

General Erhard Rauss (6th Panzer, 47 Pz Corps, 3 and 4 Panzer Army at various times) wrote a book on improvisations during the Russian campaign, which has a small section on weapons improvisations. Speaking of 1941 he writes "As the standard German AT weapons proved ineffective against the T-34, light howitzers (i.e. 105s) as well as captured Russian 76mm guns were used as direct fire weapons against tanks". He also speaks of extensive use of mines for the same reason. This shouldn't really need establishing, but some seem to doubt it, so I thought it was worth citing from such a credible source.

In CMBB, many Russian light tanks have no transport capacity. But I've seen evidence they were used to carry men, and even to tow guns. In a book called Battle for Moscow, among the pictures between pages 208 and 209 there is one of a pair of T-60s towing what are clearly ZiS-3 76mm divisional guns through the snow, with the decks of the tanks covered with gunners.

The standard small arms composition of Russian 1943 infantry seems to follow TOE tables, including the 6 LMG per platoon standard and limited numbers of SMGs in the rifle infantry. But in a book on great battles on the eastern front, based mostly on Russian staff studies, there are some detailed breakdowns of small arms in various large formations and campaigns, that do not match the TOE figures. Some these seperate figures for combat troops compared to service troops. LMGs are less common, SMGs more so.

E.g. Voronezh front in the period of the Kursk counteroffensive, the reports list 192k rifles, 109k SMGs, 13.6k LMGs. That is 1 LMG per 23 weapons, 35% of the other weapons SMG. There is no way to get that rifle to LMG ratio with CMBB mid 1943 infantry types. Rifle pattern infantry gives 12-10-58 per company, SMG gives 0-93-4, Recon A gives 3-10-25 per platoon. All thus have 5-8 rifle to LMG ratios, vs. 14 historically.

You can get the right number of SMGs by using more than the TOE number of SMG companies. I suppose you can add pioneers to "goose" the rifles without LMGs. At any rate, it is evidence the "heavy squad", 6 LMG platoon type wasn't typically achieved in practice, while SMGs were plentiful.

A realistic overall mix would be obtained by mixing - 9 recon A platoons, 1 SMG company, and 1 pioneer company. Using 3 companies of the standard 1943 rifle instead of "recon A", you'd get 2.4 times as many LMGs as you "should" (for that overall number, or that number of rifles), and only about 0.8 times as many SMGs.

Some have wondered whether artillery lasted when infantry didn't, in the long defensive battles. There is a fine operational history of the German XX corps (4 infantry divisions, various additions and subtractions at various times) in its long retreat from the Kursk battle, in of all things a book on the German perspective on Kursk. It was written by the corps CO, and includes a fine OOB down to battalion level, including listing artillery in each division.

A force of 32 infantry type battalions - not counting engineers and construction battalions - was supported by the following artillery park - 6x210mm, 57x150mm, 134x105mm. In CM terms, each battalion had one battery of 105 and half a battery of 150s available to support it.

But here is the kicker - these "battalions" were understrength even at the start of the period, and before the end of it were down to 70 men apiece. By the end of September, "divisions" had 850 men in fighting units. While still having enourmous frontages to cover.

Interesting in itself, the tactical problem these units would have faced can be roughly approximated, in CMBB terms, with the following force composition and space to cover. It is very light on the infantry manpower.

A company of infantry, 2 extra HMGs (4 all told) and 2 81mm mortars (a few LMGs OK) holds 2.5 km of ground, with support from 2x105mm and 1x150mm FOs. For guns they might have 1-3 75mm PAK or 75mm infantry guns (mixed) from organic units. They'd have all the trenches and TRPs they could want, but no wire to speak of and only limited mines.

In addition, realistic additions for this particular force if the Russians brought any armor to the sector would be 2x88mm FLAK, or a reinforcement force of 2-3 StuG (with a platoon of infantry, perhaps).

The attackers? Various, all over the map at different times. But typically a battalion or more of green Russian infantry (actually representing a reduced regiment), occasionally supported by T-34s or mixed T-34s and T-70s. Prep barrages, but little reactive arty support (an 82 FO, a few on map 76s).

With the defense so wide and manpower thin on the ground and in trenches, you can see why pre-planned arty fire did not simply rule the day. On the other hand, depth to absorb infantry casualties among the defenders was non-existent.

One other tidbit emerges from the same history, on the debated subject of Sturm battalions. XX corps had a Sturm battalion sent to it from army reserve, which then worked with one of its component divisions from the rest of the campaign. That is a true Sturm battalion in the TOE sense.

But the corps also formed another Sturm battalion internally, and used it as a counterattack reserve. Also, one of the divisions formed a "schnell" battalion from available transport, a single motorized infantry unit (organizationally a battalion, in strength more like company size). It too acted as a reaction reserve, though more for defense of threatened areas than explicitly for counterattacks.

I hope some of these are interesting.

[engy]

Originally posted by JasonC:

there is one of a pair of T-60s towing what are clearly ZiS-3 76mm divisional guns through the snow, with the decks of the tanks covered with gunners.

It's all quite interesting! Thanks for posting it.

Now, this may be an absurdly obvious question, but I'll ask it anyway: What about ammo for the guns? Any sign of any, or were the guns being transported to an already-prepared postiion?

Edit because I hit the return key when I really didn't want to.

[ June 12, 2003, 04:41 PM: Message edited by: engy ]

[MikeyD]

Yeh, there was a stink awhile ago on the board about not having proper vehicles to tow Russian heavy field pieces, and I had suggested BFC configure Russian light tanks to allow towing. But My FANTASTIC idea just came too late to be incorporated... or maybe they just thought it was a dumb idea. Whichever.

[Andreas]

I did not think the Schnelle Abteilung was anything special. I always understood it was a fairly normal thing to do when you needed to economise on manpower in the German divisions. AIUI it is a mix of the recce and the AT battalion, both of which would normally be the only (at least partly) motorised formations in the standard Infanterie Division.

[SgtMuhammed]

Nice post Jason. The scenario ideas are bursting forth.

[Bastables]

Originally posted by JasonC:

General Erhard Rauss (6th Panzer, 47 Pz Corps, 3 and 4 Panzer Army at various times) wrote a book on improvisations during the Russian campaign, which has a small section on weapons improvisations. Speaking of 1941 he writes "As the standard German AT weapons proved ineffective against the T-34, light howitzers (i.e. 105s) as well as captured Russian 76mm guns were used as direct fire weapons against tanks". He also speaks of extensive use of mines for the same reason. This shouldn't really need establishing, but some seem to doubt it, so I thought it was worth citing from such a credible source.

Which of course still does not support your inital argument that the 5cm KwK found the front turret of 1941 T-34 impenetrable at all ranges.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

Yeh, there was a stink awhile ago on the board about not having proper vehicles to tow Russian heavy field pieces, and I had suggested BFC configure Russian light tanks to allow towing. But My FANTASTIC idea just came too late to be incorporated... or maybe they just thought it was a dumb idea. Whichever.

How do you incorporate ammo portage, though, as mentioned above? An artillery piece towed by truck or HT, I guess you can presume the ammo is in the truck.

Maybe in the engine rewrite, ammo will be modelled seperately? How's your RAM?

There would be advantages to modelling ammo seperately; big SPs could have support vehicles as they did in real life, you could have infantry resupply as we talked about in my PAY ATTENTION BATTLEFRONT thread, etc.

Then you could tow guns with tanks; have the ammo become part of the gun crew's carrying burden and assume they are carrying it by hand and leaving the rest behind, or else throwing it on a truck or horsecart, if available, etc. Untended ammo could be written off by the AI.

The 70 figure for infantry battalions is interesting. A historian of note I used to correspond with found it remarkable when he related to me the story of a surrender in Italy by a German Leutnant (2nd Lieutenant) - he was a regimental commander at the time. Things were tough all over!

[Michael Emrys]

As for transporting gun ammo, were caissons still in use at all? I've seen them for the 25pdr in the BCE armies, but were they used by any other units? Granted their capacity was limited, but it would be a giant step up from none at all.

Michael

[Andreas]

In fast-moving mechanised combat, I don't think the ammo issue would be such a massive problem. Scheibert in 'Bis Stalingrad 48km' describes the Soviet tactic to bring up guns hitched to the tanks, drop them off on the battlefield, and then try to draw the German panzers onto them (10 points if you can tell me what that reminds me off). He says it came as a bad surprise to the Germans, and was quite effective.

One supposes you don't need a lot of rounds to achieve that effect.

[Mies]

JasonC quoted:

"As the standard German AT weapons proved ineffective against the T-34, light howitzers (i.e. 105s) as well as captured Russian 76mm guns were used as direct fire weapons against tanks".

I have to say that the use of 105mm howitzers against Russian armour proved helpfull in several cases although it isn't my prefered AT weapon. I found myself in several (=2) tight spots in the past with AT waepons out of LOS or taken out. Firing HE shells at T34's and even KV's apeared a could enough option then. A lucky track hit, gun damage or panicking crews. Whatever does the job I'd say!

Mies

[SgtMuhammed]

What most pictures of combat vehicles towing field pieces don't show is the one in the group pulling the ammo caisson. Ammo could also be carried in crates strapped to the tank or to the gun itself. It wouldn't be a lot, especially for the larger guns, but it would be something to get by on for a little while.

[TheCrow]

I have a problem to show Battalion/Company great losses in scenarios, these losses was not due for recent combat, Are due by manpower shortage and a accumulate attriction.

How can I show realistic organization?

-Removing full platoons

-Removing one or more squads by platoon

-Or choose the program casuality rate

Thank you

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Andreas:

In fast-moving mechanised combat, I don't think the ammo issue would be such a massive problem. Scheibert in 'Bis Stalingrad 48km' describes the Soviet tactic to bring up guns hitched to the tanks, drop them off on the battlefield, and then try to draw the German panzers onto them (10 points if you can tell me what that reminds me off). He says it came as a bad surprise to the Germans, and was quite effective.

One supposes you don't need a lot of rounds to achieve that effect.

Sounds like the German tactic of getting British tanks in the desert to roll on their 88s.

[JasonC]

On moving ammo, they obviously found a way to do it because the battery was in action later that night, as the following picture in the book and its caption makes clear. I would guess there were more T-60s than guns to move, though. They probably moved the ammo operation in other tanks, besides the towing ones.

You could stow a few rounds inside, and if crated get others on the back deck if that weren't full of people. In the picture with the towed guns, there are ~5-8 people on the back of the tiny T-60s, so there is not a lot of room for anything else. Obviously this gets a bit harder if the shells are 150mm = 100 lbs, instead of 76mm = less than 15 lbs.

Towing capacity 6 with one team transport capacity would work, in CMBB terms. The same for the T-70. Incidentally, I also find it annoying that a jeep can't move an 82mm mortar, apparently because the computer thinks the 7th man in the mortar team won't fit. Realistically they'd just have a man go on ammo detail and still move the mortar, rather than walking to keep the last private with them.

On showing units with high losses, I think the best way is to remove elements down to about 1/3 lost, but beyond that it is more realistic to use consolidation of units, aka "step reduction". Thus a battalion could have 2 companies for 6 platoons plus weapons overall. Or even 2 companies each with 2 platoons. But below that, you'd just use a company, then a company with a missing platoon. Otherwise you get way too many HQs, not enough fighting units.

As for using the random loss assigner, one might I suppose for the last 20%. If would be more likely to reduce riflemen, which would be realistic. You don't want to use higher settings or you start losing weapons teams, FOs, etc, and imbalancing the force you tried to represent. Higher settings are fine for a random QB where you want to force yourself to make do with whatever is left, but for a scenario you want more control over the loss impact than that.

[c3k]

JasonC,

Thanks for the post. Any chance we could get you to list authors and titles of those books?

Ken

[engy]

Andreas said:

One supposes you don't need a lot of rounds to achieve that effect.

sgt goody said:

What most pictures of combat vehicles towing field pieces don't show is the one in the group pulling the ammo caisson. Ammo could also be carried in crates strapped to the tank or to the gun itself. It wouldn't be a lot, especially for the larger guns, but it would be something to get by on for a little while.

JasonC said:

They probably moved the ammo operation in other tanks, besides the towing ones.

...

You could stow a few rounds inside, and if crated get others on the back deck if that weren't full of people

...

Towing capacity 6 with one team transport capacity would work, in CMBB terms.

So, we've established how it was done historically (summarized in the above quotes...my apologies if I've snipped something you consider important). But, if we're now talking about how to implement it into CMxx, it doesn't sound like the gun should be able to be transported with it's entire ammo load by just one tank, and it seems somewhat doubtful that towing caissons is going to make it into the code. Would it be accurate then to implement a 1-man-casualty-panzershreck-team type model, where the ammo supply is reduced if the gun is transported? But, then, how would the AI know the difference between being transported by a towing-capacity-6-with-full-ammo (say, a universal carrier) vs a towing-capacity-6-with-reduced-ammo (say, a T-70)?

[JasonC]

I don't see the need to distinguish. It is not like the current way gun movement is handled really reflects loading and unloading 50 rounds of ammo. The set up time is 2 minutes or so at the far end. It takes seconds to load the gun once the mover is in place. I don't think that is meant to represent loading 50 seperate rounds up to 33 lbs apiece (for a 105mm howitzer e.g.) into a Bren carrier or what have you.

Real movements of whole batteries are coordinated affairs between multiple vehicles or multiple trips. But tactically, if the gun is moved and set up, it can fire its first few rounds from its new location. Ammo will find its way there. The tactical movement of guns is all rough as it is. They wouldn't move so slow pushed by hand, for instance. They wouldn't turn backwards to push to the rear. Etc.

Gun movements are a marginal thing on the time scale of CMBB scenarios, and trying to track the movement of every shell would be ridiculous over concern with realism in one place, where there is darn little of it in other related places. It suffices if moving guns is hard, you don't want to get shot at while doing it, and it takes several minutes.

[Michael Dorosh]

In other words, ammo supply and resupply for on board mortars and guns is abstracted in CM now, just as stuff like medical evacuations are.

[markl]

Thanks for the post.

[White Phosphorus]

The LMG SMG deal could be a translation error of some sort. David Glantz in his book on Soviet operations in Manchuria lists 4 infantry support weapons at one point. HMGs MMGs LMGs and HandMGs. Which I'm assuming are Maxims Goryunovs Degtyaryevs and .... In Russian the squad "LMGs" are called hand machineguns. So something is obviously being misidentified here. And given the sloppy way the Soviets name their guns, it is not surprising. Both assault riffles/automatic riffles and sub-machineguns are usually called avtomat, the term light machinegun pops up too along with the hand machinegun.

[JasonC]

No, I don't think the SMGs and LMGs are being mis IDed at all. The tables give numbers for LMGs, MMGs, and heavy MGs, the last being 50 cals, the middle being Maxims, and the first being the pan LMG varieties. There are only 13.6K of the LMGs for Voronezh front in August of 1943.

For comparison, there are 2400 MMGs and 600 50 cals, figures comparable to the numbers for various mortar types. This is for over 300k combat troops - service troops are listed seperately. While there are over 100k of the SMGs, so clearly those are not pan fed squad LMGs.

It is really not surprising. The Russians made millions of SMGs and they were rugged and popular with the men. So naturally rifles drop out as losses are taken while SMGs disproportionately find new owners. But the LMGs were much more specialized items, scarcer and more valuable, harder to replace, etc.

They apparently just did not manage to field 1 per squad at that point in the fighting, let alone the 6 per platoon the 1943 TOE plan hoped for. It is hardly the first time a TOE over-represented a desireable item of equipment.

The ratio of the types is still recognizable. 1 out of 24 weapons is a pan fed LMG, while 1 out of 3 is an SMG. You can't cross those, as though somehow they got reversed or something, and get anything sensible. There are still 4.5 times as many LMGs as heavier, crew served ones - just as you'd expect with 9 per company vs. 2 per company. There are also around 10k ATRs listed, similar to the number of LMGs but slightly under it.

[Michael Dorosh]

Just a note sort of on topic - bear in mind that some sources do take the German for heavy machinegun - "sMG" or schwere Maschine Gewehr - and simply translate it into English as SMG, which to us means submachinegun.

[Sergei]

In 1941 Soviets had trouble at arming the reserves they called to service. G. N. Kurijanov, who was the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Karelian Republic during war time, says in "Ot Barentseva Morja do Ladogi" (1972) that the 27th Division formed in August had 6000 men with 30 MG's, 93 SMG's and one mortar battalion of 42 mortars. He's not a particularly trustworthy source (claiming that nearly all Finnish soldiers carried a Suomi SMG etc. and obviously a hardline communist), but obviously they had lack of automated and support weapons in newly formed divisions.

[JasonC]

No such confusion is going on. The original sources are Russian staff, not German. The translators are later American writers, not Germans. Heavy machineguns are clearly IDed seperately and are present in only tiny numbers, less than heavy mortars. Nobody is confusing 600 .50 caliber machineguns with 109,000 PPsHs.

They simply did not have enough squad LMGs to equip every squad with them at the new 1943 TOE, or even a full 1 per squad in all troop types. But they had plenty of SMGs, 1 in 3 small arms in the combat units.

Nobody who has seen the production figures for the various small arms, as opposed to TOE tables, can be surprised at this. There is no mystery in it. Roughly 1 in 3 small arms produced in Russia during the war was an SMG.

The armament is obviously far superior to the late 1941 case, where units were equipped on a shoestring, but in LMGs it does not reach the very high level called for in the 1943 TOE plan. A few guards divisions might have achieved that. Whole Fronts did not see that level of LMGs in mid 1943.