British Armor Tactics in North Africa

[Zveroboy]

I stumbled across this interesting bit while reading about british tank tactics in North Africa :

"In Tank vs Tank actions fire must be distributed to include all the enemy AFVs on ship-for-ship basis. Every tank will engage its opposite number in the enemy formation. That is to say, flank tanks will engage the enemy flank tanks and the center tanks engage those in the center of the enemy line... This ensures that fire is distributed along the whole length of the enemy line."

Tank Combat in North Africa : The opening rounds

Thomas Jentz

Chapter 5 : Armored Force Tactics, p 69

Well in CMAK I will usually have several of my tanks concentrate their fire on a single enemy tank; it never occured to me that tanks used to spread their fire so much in real life.

Also wasn't it the opposite for infantry tactics in the british army? From what I read british infantry was famous for its fire discipline and one of the roles of the officer was to direct the fire of its troops with the whole platoon firing at the same target.

Why is it different for armor tactics?

And what was the doctrine for other nations in WWII?

Discuss.

[tar]

Maybe they got their fire tactics from the Royal Navy?

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[JasonC]

The British armor proper was poorly handled. I wouldn't go there for lessons. They tended to use massed tanks in fairly suicidal ways. But there were commonwealth units that did much better. I recommend looking at the New Zealanders, for instance. They had infantry formations in the driver's seat, working with arty and led by infantry tanks - Valentines e.g. That can be a strong way to fight.

The reason is the Vals can handle any armor the Germans have in the era. While the main German counter to them - a few high cost uberguns dismounted - are readily handled by infantry support weapons and arty (which mask them with dusk when they don't KO them outright). Don't think infantry charge, think Vals force all enemy vehicles to hide, then infantry scouts under mortar and gun overwatch.

The commonweath forces also got pretty good at night infantry attacks, minimizing the effect of wide LOS to isolate bits of the defense, plaster selected bits with (in CMAK terms, preplanned turn 1 then Q delayed) arty just ahead of the infantry, and mop them up before anyone else could help. But that is not the armor handling case you asked about...

[YankeeDog]

Welcome back, Jason! I've missed your input here on the boards, and I suspect others have, too.

Apologies if you came back earlier and I missed it -- I actually just got back here on the boards after a couple weeks' vacation.

Hope all is well. Good stuff, as always.

Cheers,

YD

[Zveroboy]

Thanks for the input.

I forgot to mention it but that bit of tactics was about cruiser tanks.

Yes I have read a little on the official history of New Zealand and I have to say it is very interesting and pretty well written.

http://www.nzetc.org/corpora/WH2.html

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by JasonC:

The British armor proper was poorly handled. I wouldn't go there for lessons. They tended to use massed tanks in fairly suicidal ways. But there were commonwealth units that did much better. I recommend looking at the New Zealanders, for instance. They had infantry formations in the driver's seat, working with arty and led by infantry tanks - Valentines e.g. That can be a strong way to fight.

That, of course, is not so much the difference between British and Commonwealth (as far as I'm aware no NZ armour saw action until Italy) as the difference between "armour" and "tanks" in British tactical thinking.

All the best,

John.

[Zveroboy]

John could you please explain the difference between armour and tanks in British doctrine.

The book claims that although the cruiser armor was frequently penetrated by 20 mm AP which usually passed through both sides, sometimes without harming the crew; there was little or no "flaking", unlike the Italians in which the crews were nearly always killed by flake fragments when the tanks were hits.

I wonder if this is modelled in CM and if the Italian tanks are more prone to flaking.

Another thing that struck me is the fact that although the cruiser tank was designed as a fast, lightly armored tank for mobile warfare, in practice they never used full throttle and would rarely go faster than 12 mph. It was to avoid mechanical breakdown but also because Mk.II and MkIV cruisers were mixed in units.

[JasonC]

Part of the British (and commonwealth) tank force was contained in "Armour brigades" and "Armour divisions". These were conceived as independent tank led forces, meant to operate as a mobile arm. They had supporting motorized infantry and artillery as in US armor divisions or German panzer divisions - though they stayed tank-heavy to about midwar, and in practice their tanks often operated pretty much on their own, in large bodies.

(They were also thought of as having guns optimized for fighting other tanks, with the MG thought of as the main weapon against infantry. A few howitzer tanks provided self propelled artillery support, effectively, including smoke). This was the use of tanks that the original theorists of the tank arm had advocated. Don't "tie us to the infantry", let us operate "at our own speed", keep the tanks "massed". There was a fair amount of "cavalry thinking" in all this. This was called "armour", as a branch of service.

The alternate use of tanks was to support infantry formations. The Brits left part of their tank force for that role. They used slower tanks for it, which they thought wouldn't keep up with the role envisioned for the armour. These tended to be quite thickly armored, because they were originally intended to do things like duel pillboxes and "fight the infantry through" WW I style battlefields. Matildas and Valentines. These were called "infantry tanks". The branch of service that controlled them went by "tank" designations, rather than "armour" designations.

6th Royal Tank Regiment would mean a "tank" formation, about battalion size in US or German terms. Using infantry tanks, Matildas or Valentines, to support infantry divisions. 7th Armoured Brigade would mean an "armour" formation, brigade size. Using "cruiser" tanks (not that model, but in contrast to "infantry" tanks) - thinner armor and meant to be faster.

The cruiser models - A13 etc - were early versions of the armour idea. The Crusader was the first in the line of tanks meant to operate that way, that actually fit the bill. They also use Honeys (Stuarts for Americans) for this. In practice, massed thin armor on its own proved highly vulnerable to German combined arms. They found it hard to deal with gun fronts, for example. On occasion, whole tank brigades were shot to rags in a single afternoon, trying to attack positions that should have been blanketed with artillery not charged with thin tanks.

The "armour" side thought of themselves as by far the more prestigious, modern, theoretically sound, and forward looking. It also usually lost, sometimes horribly, against anything but Italians. The "tank" side won most of its battles. Thick armor and real combined arms cooperation proved more important than the "armour" theorists had thought, and speed was no more a substitute for armor on land, than it was for battlecruisers at Jutland.

In the late war, the armour forces had Shermans, a distinct improvement. And they got much better at combined arms coordination. (Though some cases like Goodwood, they still managed to screw it up). The tank units had Churchills and such. The armour branch was more successful then - which is not to say the tanks weren't, just that the armour went from disfunctional to functional after midwar.

In CM terms, an armour division type and usually an armor force type, using Crusaders or Stuarts etc, would be a typical armour branch force. A tank force would typically show up as an infantry division parent unit, combined arms force type, with all the armor points allowed spent on Matildas or Valentines. If you try both, I think you will see that the latter works pretty darn well in practice against typical German desert era stuff.

[ March 13, 2005, 03:50 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

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[JasonC]

Nice to have the time for it again, and thanks. I trust you are well.

The idea was that the Germans had a general "soft systems dominance" in armored or mobile combat generally, in France in 1940. Yes I still think that. That means tanks that can talk to each other, it means better vision, it means better C3, it means more men in each turret, some of them in charge of the tank not the loading process, it means better doctrine and tactical decisions and combined arms.

The data point that convinced me of it was looking through day by day narratives on the French campaign and scanning for reported AFV losses within those tactical narratives. What stood out is that the Germans won bigger, the bigger the absolute scale of the engagement. The small stuff was almost even. Company sized the Germans are winning. Battalion and up, they are routing huge formations for minimal losses themselves, without having superior tanks in gun and armor terms.

I think German tanks operated at a larger scale as coordinated wholes, than did their French counterparts. I think the latter were often suffering tactical myopia, focused on what was happening to their tank, or their platoon, and little else. Poor situational awareness. When the engagement is small that isn't a large factor compared to who has thicker armor or a more powerful gun. But when the engagement is large, it is much more important than technical details. Because a whole company will kill whatever it hits, if those fight uncoordinated and piecemeal.

The Germans still lost occasionally, even in sizeable fights. Particularly against gun fronts, when the French managed to put one together. But in my reading anyway that tended to be after the French had lost their local armor.

It is also possible, incidentally, that the French armor suffered serious readiness problems and was not able to do on the ground what its strength on paper might suggest. (See my discussion of CSS and the Russians, elsewhere recently. I doubt the French were that bad off, but nobody pretends they were masters at it).

As for maneuver strategies for the Allies in the west, I can think of a way, but I doubt it was realistic. Not Med sideshows (which Churchill wanted, to avoid German land combat power directly). Even Italy was an indecisive distraction, though no doubt useful politically. No, the case in favor of it is the south of France operation.

When that happened, the German defenders had to pull out essentially as fast as they could. Whole divisions were smashed in days and the main body barely got away, to say nothing of stopping the attack. Of course, their whole front was collapsing - overdetermined. But it suggests a possible strategy.

You land in Normandy but don't really commit there. When the Germans react, you land in Biscay. When they react again, you land in the south. In Brittany. Each time you put ashore a corps to an army, not an army group. You let the Germans pick their poison.

They can try to hold everything but realistically won't be able to. Tac Air, maquis blowing up the rail lines, heavies on the marshalling yards all wreck easy or rapid strategic redeployment. Someplace maybe they threaten to drive you clear into the sea. OK, so that is where the battleships park and shoot them up. Maybe they even succeed - after a couple of carpet bombings, and one place only. But they won't pull it off in four spots in two months.

Somewhere, you break out. You get a mobile corps out in their rear. Then you logistically reinforce that success. Fast units try to isolate defenders on their own beach area, pocketing the slow guys. They race for all available bridges, if possible cut off the guys behind a neighboring beach. The Germans will send somebody to stop this. OK, tac air goes after them.

The mobile guys don't try to hold everything they've reached. When the panzer divisions show up opposite them, they blow every bridge, tear up every viaduct and causeway, blow down trees, and back off. Meanwhile every TD in the clear races to the area. Tac air works them over throughout the delay. Meanwhile you are trying to break out elsewhere too, before they can collapse the next bubble. And your IDs back by the beach one formed around, in the meantime devour the slow German formations left near their part of the coast.

At some point the Germans just can't hold it all and pull back to a more defensible line - the Seine, say. Then you link all the beaches and take half of France. You kill whatever doesn't get away.

Notice, the threat of invasion after invasion will tend to freeze defenders. They can't evacuate the Pas de calais and you don't try to land there. They can't defend Normandy with troops from Brittany without giving you Brittany. In Normandy you go for a "small solution" - just cut the Cherbourg penisula, don't extend all the way east to Caen.

Maybe they make some serious mistakes and let you bag even more than Falaise, without the same two months of meatgrinder. Or maybe you lose one of the beaches completely, have to fight defensively for the first breakout from another, and the remainder are as bottled up as Anzio was. High risk, unclear upside compared to the real deal. But that would be the maneuverist way to fight the France campaign.

I don't think it is realistic as an alternate strategy for several reasons. One, there was more of a limit on shipping and amphib in particular than people guess. South of France was run on a shoestring shipping wise, and needed all the amphib uses in Normandy to be basically over. Two, the logistics of it would be formidable, and allied supply broke down almost the minute the invasion got off the beaches, even with two months to build up ashore and stockpile things. Three, serious risk of calamity on one beach or more, probably unacceptable politically. (Whose beach do the Germans pick on? What happens to cooperation then, in practice? We rib each other over US-Brit rivalry but in Normandy it basically worked).

There is also just the fact that nobody knew beforehand that Bagration was going to work and rip a million men out of the center of the eastern front, right when it helped the most. If that weren't assured, all the stuff that went east to plug that whole could have gone west to smash the little separate beachheads. As it was, the Germans sent a one-off force it took the allies 2 months to chew through. If they had any replacement stream behind it to hold it up, it would have looked much dicier.

With the Normandy approach actually used, you can handle that. When they don't have enough to send, you chew through them and win. If they did have enough, you remained bottled for a while, but on a front you have defend with lots of arty and supply. Assuming they don't get you in the first few days, they aren't going to get you. You may have to chew longer, or wait for the Russians to hurt them someplace and divert the replacement stream.

But in the end, you will break out. Because you are on the ground and chewing and they can't stop it, and between the Russians and the western allies, the Germans can't take chewing on that fast. So I think the approached actually used was sound. But then I think lots of things that have attrition at their core are sound, and others don't like to think such thoughts (lol).

[JasonC]

As for later on, Allied "play" clearly deteriorates in the fall. My diagnosis is gradually ebbing optimism. They hope the Germans are just crumbling and won't be able to stand. Reality sets in only gradually and they are consistently underestimating the defense they face. They then dissipate effort on too many things.

Napoleon had a line, there are many good generals in Europe but they see too many things at once. Whereas I see only one thing, the main body of the enemy. This I crush, confident that lesser matters will take care of themselves. I see some applicability of this from September to November for the western allies. They are too focused on geography and not enough on Germans.

Market Garden was the razzle dazzle maneuverist dream of war won on the cheap with just two high tech corps and audacity. Didn't work. Not enough scale for the defense still faced. Wasn't close either, in my estimation. Even if XXX corps gets across, it isn't backed by enough to get out of the resulting bridgehead. The operation needed an army, not a corps. But then the whole thing was a gamble that the Germans were on their last legs, and when it turned out they just weren't, that was pretty much that.

Then they try too much. Clear all the estuaries. Take Metz. Take Aachen, Hurtgen, Strasbourg. This is more than broad front, it is lack of operational thought. They should have put an army in reserve as soon as they realized they'd actually have to fight through the westwall. An army with plenty of armor - like 3 ADs. Then instead of reading geography and making wish lists and pressing hard everywhere, feeding failure stubbornly, probe opportunistically and reinforce success. Go not where you need something, but where the Germans aren't. They were weak in the south. They were weak beyond Nancy rather than around Metz. They were weaker in the Ardennes than in the Hurtgen. You wouldn't need to make as many set piece attacks up north if you can bypass estuary positions that only keep the rivers closed. Push east and northeast there, and just stretch them.

Someplace one of these things starts succeeding. The Germans have a crust but not a lot of depth. Pick a spot they look thin, and hit it with an entire second echelon army, on top of an attack that is already making progress. Maybe that is the northeast. Maybe it is Lorraine, or way south. You have the trucks, use them. Put a whole army behind the best case in under a week (Bulge proved it was possible), and attack there in deep column rather than thin-fronting it everywhere. That would have been big chess thinking, rather than tactical myopia all along the line.

There are other problems with the western allies, clear in hindsight, less operational play and more force design and doctrine. The replacement system was a mess. Should have had integrated replacement battalions in every division and trained integration to new units. Could have had 10 million more arty shells afloat, and a less chaotic distribution system (starving one army, letting another horde, etc). Could have had Easy Eights and plenty of APCR, by the fall if not in Normandy. A better replacement system would have helped on the next - could have had more infantry depth in the ADs. They were always low, and it hurt staying power in attacks. Could have used ADs in tandem much more often - as it was they tended to be used at a combat command scale rather than corps scale. Hurtgen was also just very poorly directed as a battle. (Nothing wrong with other cases frequently cited like TD doctrine though).

I don't think chewing through the front with attrition tactics in Normandy was a mistake. But there were mistakes, especially later, those above being the biggies in my book. The Bulge was a mistake the other way, throwing away armor better used as a reaction reserve, and made up for a lot of the above, once the allies stopped it and cut up the force sent for it. That is the first time they are clearly playing big chess again, since August. (MG is maybe one knight fork threat worth of big chess, but no heavy wood behind it).

FWIW...

[ March 15, 2005, 05:14 AM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[junk2drive]

Did the Allies have the info that you do in hindsight? As in, Germans weak in the South?

Does MG show that info was wrong or misunderstood? Did the Germans use decoy / deception?

Good reads Jason. Welcome back.

[JasonC]

No they didn't know exactly where they were strong or weak, but they didn't much care either. They kept attacking bits of geography they wanted that were well defended by Germans - the estuaries (because they wanted the route to Antwerp opened for supply purposes), Aachen (because it was the high road to the Ruhr), Hurtgen (because it seemed the way to "turn" the Aachen position), Metz (because it was there and Patton had a fit of stubbornness - not his finest hour).

My suggestion is that they probe and reinforce whatever is working instead of bludgeoning these targets repeatedly, despite finding them well defended. Would they have found the weaker German areas? I don't see why not. Generalized desire to deceive doesn't stop infantry regiments actively attacking for days. That takes a real line. If they make progress, back them. If they don't, rest and probe elsewhere.

Instead they doubled and tripled up on the frustrating places because they wanted particular geographic assets. The focus was not on killing the Germans wherever possible as efficiently as possible, but on grabbing things. There was a decent reason for maybe half of these things. But the net effect was "hit 'em where they are".

[junk2drive]

Sounds like egos and hardheadedness plus politics.

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[JasonC]

"I think a surrounded German division, faced with American Arty and no supplies (they were already short, right?) would have been hard pressed to get out of that situation."

Against a determined attack, yes. But they don't just give up. The evidence for both comes from the port city fights. Something like a quarter of a million Germans got bottled up in those as it was, trying to deny the Allies the ports. The Allies picked ones to assault - Cherbourg, Brest, several places in the south of France. In each case, they were able to take the place within a few days once they had forces opposite and delivered a set-piece attack. But it took real numbers - a division or two. The places they did not do this and just tried to starve them out, the Germans happily held on for months on end.

I think if you surround forces by the beaches you get most of them. Some retreat into little fortress pockets and stay cut off there. Most, you have to put in troops and effort, but you eat them and it doesn't take much time.

"Germany can react with armoured reserves, but then Tac-Air has a field day and so do the TD's. Or is that overly optimistic?"

That would be the idea, but it crucially depends on not trying to keep everything taken. The Germans got their PDs across France. They got them opposite the Normandy position, under concentrated air. They delivered corps sized reinforcements as counterattacks on occasion. And KG size or PD sized attack, readily. Mortain was compromised by Ultra, TD battalions, arty groups, and tac air all put on the scene. And it failed - but it broke in first.

You aren't going to stop them from getting at you at all. They will hit you. If you are willing and able to give ground, though, you can delay them seriously. The Germans did all the above approaching a nice fixed target. It would have been harder to e.g. send two corps to the south of France, repairing bridges blown by retreating forces and policing up blown trees etc. Air would still have been there. Air isn't dangerous to the tanks, really, but it is to the trucks. And makes units move by night.

I think you still have to fight them, it could be iffy, and even if it works they are marginally more likely to hold at the Seine with a reasonable force, than the real event. I don't think you avoid attriting them sometime. The argument might be, you can avoid much of the infantry army. Well, the Germans lost something like 200k in Normandy, and then lost another 250k in the retreat and Falaise and the ports. Hard to top. Might not have looked that way in the frustration of mid July, but attrition as a strategy did not result in Verdun redux every mile to the German border. Because anti force targeting works. Simple, to me.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by JasonC:

6th Royal Tank Regiment would mean a "tank" formation, about battalion size in US or German terms.

[snips]

The "armour" side thought of themselves as by far the more prestigious, modern, theoretically sound, and forward looking.

While the rest of the explanation is reasonably sound, Mr. Picky must belatedly pick this one up just in case someone runs away with the idea that one can tell whether a unit is "tanks" or "armour" just by looking at the unit designation. If form follows function in the British Army, it always does so at a discreet distance, and often heavily disguised.

In particular, 6 RTR was part of an armoured division -- variously 2nd, 7th and 10th Armoured, as far as I can tell -- for the whole of its WW2 career. Although the Royal Tank Regiment (variously RTR, R Tanks or simply "The Tanks") traced its lineage from the Heavy Section, the Machine-Gun Corps, later the Tank Corps, and preserved infantry nomenclature until part-way through the war (by which I mean calling its battalions "battalions", rather than "regiments"), it could still man cruiser tanks in the armoured brigade role.

Carlos D'Este does a very good job of distinguishing the four main kinds of unit that operated tanks in the British Army, all part of the RAC (Royal Armoured Corps):

1. The regular cavalry, mechanized since the 1930s.

2. The Royal Tank Regiment.

3. The Yeomanry, or reserve cavalry; and

4. RAC regiments converted from infantry battalions.

As far as I have been able to establish (with the aid of Malcolm Bellis' splendid "Datafile: British Tanks and Formations 1939-45"), one could meet any of the four kinds of unit in an armoured brigade, and any except regular cavalry in a tank brigade (although there doesn't seem to be much Yeomanry in the tank role apart from the North Irish Horse).

One might think that all armour, or at least all but light AFVs (such as those used by carrier platoons, motor battalions and the Reconnaisance Corps, which provided the divisional recce troops for infantry divisions) would be under RAC control, but, again, I'm afraid its not that simple.

The Guards always like to be in charge of their own affairs, and have a rule that "A guardsman is always a guardsman". AIUI, the household cavalry never came under RAC control, but formed a combined regiment in the armoured car (formation recce) role, where one would normally expect to find mechanized cavalry. The foot guards, bafflingly, formed their own armoured division and, later, tank brigade, again not forming part of the RAC (so, when you look up their war diaries at the PRO, they are listed under "infantry").

Oh, and, just in case there is any chance of anyone still detecting any faint trace of regularity in all this, it seems that for a while in 1941 7th Armoured Division had a Tank Brigade reporting to it.

In 1945, someone in the War Office had a rush of blood to the head and redesignated (almost) all tank brigades as armoured brigades.

Now, my favourite explanation of the difference between armour and tanks comes from John Foley's "Mailed Fist", a superb book that I would recommend to anyone. Here it is:

"At the risk of sounding like a military text book (which Heaven forbid) it would be as well if I explained that there are two jobs for which tanks are considered to be the right tools. One is the short, set-piece attack, in which you are given an objective not very far away but pretty heavily defended. The other is the disorganising, long sweeps behind the enemy lines, playing havoc with his bases and lines of communication and generally getting as far as you can, as fast as you can.

The first of these jobs was the sort of thing we liked, because each of these tasks requires a different technique, different equipment and, I maintain, a different personality on the part of the tank crews.

Personally, I would much rather be shown a hill, say, a thousand yards away, and told that once I'd reached the top of that hill the job was over -- although the ground between was stiff with defence works and hateful devices to stop us reaching that hill.

I have an inherent loathing of dashing madly through enemy-held territory for mile after mile, never knowing which bend in the road conceals an anti-tank ambush, and expecting any moment to hear that you've been cut off from your own supplies and the enemy were just sitting back waiting for you to run out of petrol.

This is a gross case of over-simplification, I know. But it will give you the rough idea.

And, of course, it's only fair to tell you that I've met lots of chaps in Armoured Divisions who take exactly the opposite view, and who would much rather do a mad dash across Europe than plough their way slowly and steadily through a heavily defended locality.

So there you are."

All the best,

John.

[JonS]

John,

responding to an earlier post of yours in this thread, NZ Div Cav Regt used Vickers VIs and Stuarts (albeit stolen) in ops as early as CRUSADER. Stuarts started being issued to them in significant numbers in mid-July '42, and used them till the end in NA.

[JasonC]

lol - thank you for that, John. Most amusing and as usual informative.

[Zveroboy]

Thanks John and Jason, it all makes sense now.

[Olle Petersson]

Originally posted by Zveroboy:

"In Tank vs Tank actions fire must be distributed to include all the enemy AFVs on ship-for-ship basis. Every tank will engage its opposite number in the enemy formation. ..."

Depending on the situation there's definitely some merit in this.

a) Given that your tanks have a decent probability (50% or better) to win a 1-on-1 duel head on with the enemy tanks, then spreading the fire is the fastest (and therefore safest) way to knock out the enemy.

Tanks that are being fired at perform worse than those not under fire.

Example:

10 vs 10 tanks, head on at medium range, with both sides able to score one shot kills on the opposition at equal probability.

Side A concentrate their fire towards a single enemy tank at a time, while side B spread their fire.

Volley 1:

Both sides score mostly misses, since they haven't the distance properly measured.

Volley 2:

Side A will most probably knock out one enemy, spending 10 rounds to do so.

Side B is likely to score hits on several enemies, knocking a couple of them out and throwing several others more or less "off balance".

Volley 3:

The remains of side A redirect their guns to target #2 and score some hits on it, quite possibly knocking it out.

Side B knock out more enemies with clean hits.

Volley 4+:

Side A is no longer a fighting unit.

Side B is mopping up.

This is why the 1-on-1 approach is used in modern (anti)armour tactics when the shooters are MBTs or ATGMs.

Cheers

Olle

[JasonC]

That's theory, this is the CMAK reality - even from the side, thus able to get through every plate faced, a Brit tank with 2 pdr main armament has only about one chance in four of getting a full KO with a full penetration, against a Pz III. From the front, the chance of a one shot kill is infinitessimal.

[flamingknives]

Additionally, if all the tanks keep switching targets, they lose their ranging bonus each time, while the distributed shooters would keep notching up the increases.

[Edit: that'll teach me to read things properly.]

[Carl Puppchen]

As far as how CMAK actually works, independent of the theory - doesn't each weapon independently target through the Tac AI? And don't they pick the "highest value" target in their LOS? So if there is a wide LOS lots of tanks may gang up on the same target.

This also brings up the thread that the tac AI targets platoon leaders because they have a higher point value.

All this assumes that the Tac AI wants to fight at all - sometimes they retreat if they think they don't have any chance at a kill (as an axis player I get this a lot with the Matilda).

Back to the original thread - the Allied tank attacks were suicidal because they didn't follow combined arms tactics - a mistake that I often make in CMAK because I am too aggressive and can't wait for everything to "form up" properly. Even in the 1967 and 1973 wars the Israelis fell into this problem when they pushed too hard on the "all armor" tactics and had to go back to combined arms.

Very interesting posts... and don't learn from my desert armor tactics, they aren't very good