Moltke Bridge revisited - the real one!

[Bigduke6]

*Warning! Moderate Spoilers Ahead! If you haven't played Richie's Moltke Bridge scenario and don't want to find out about all the tricks and surprises, DO NOT READ THIS!*

Ok, glad that's out of the way.

It's a funny thing about the thread on favorite AARs. I just recently did an real life AAR on my Moltke Bridge AAR. As it were.

Just for reference, after ROWV I did an AAR on Richie's Moltke Bridge scenario. If any one wants to look at it, you can find it here:

http://www.gregories.net/row/aar_mb.php

Click Bigduke6 and you'll get a pdf file.

The CM battle was pretty epic, at least for me, and so it was great fun to write up the AAR. Still, once once I did so I thought that was pretty much the end of my relationship with the Moltke Bridge and Captain/Major Neustroyev's 756th Regiment, 150th Infantry Division.

Not so. As it happened my RL job took me to Germany last month, where after watching far too much football in far too many stadiums (it was really rough, I tell ya) I found myself at the Berlin central train station with a couple of hours to kill, on a bright summer day.

And so it was that I noticed the main door of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof opens up onto Washington Square (Platz) where, not so long ago in CMBB, I fought a nasty little action against some German Fallschirmjaeger, and theoretically only a few dozen meters from Moltke Bridge, where I conducted one of the most successful deliberate assaults of my CM career.

"Hmmm...," I thought. "I bet I can find Moltke bridge around here somewhere."

And so I did, and it was a really cool couple of hours. For practical purposes, mostly because Richie's scenario is so historically accurate, I was (virtual) veteran returning to the site of an actual battlefield.

I was just like one of those old guys with medals on his jacket, looking at the peaceful green grass and the pretty girls and teenagers playing frisbee, and finding it wierd that everything was so calm and quiet, where the last time I had (virtually) been there it was all death and destruction.

The following are notes I made from walking around the area.

The bridge is about a two minute walk from the train station, and of the buildings that lined the Spree River during the war, none are left. Now it is all a great big park.

The bridge however is still there. It is 134 paces from end to end, making the modern bridge a good deal shorter than Richie's scenario, as in the scenario it's 200 meters and change from end to end.

The bridge itself is massive and there's a photograph plaque of the bridge right after the war (more on that below) and I suspect the scenario overstates the width of the river and the length of the bridge.

(Sorry Richie, you know I love the scenario, but grog-accurate is grog-accurate).

The bridge is as best as I could tell between 4.7 to 5.0 meters to a sidewalk/flat area paralleling the river on either side, at the bottom of the banks. The sidewalk/flat area is about four metres wide and one meter higher than the water itself, meaning that from the highest point of the bridge (the middle) it's about 6 meters to the water, my estimate.

On the bridge itself there are massive guard fences on either edge, made up of waist-high columns of stone topped by a equally massive horizontal slab. The whole thing works out to chest-hight. The open distance between each support post is about 40-50 centimeters, depending on which point you measure from.

The horizontal bit is topped by these Gothic stone griffons at the intersection of each bridge span.

One bridge span is 28 paces long. The bridge is five spans long, and the three center spans are over water.

I am aware 5 x 28 = 140 not 134 like the pace off I made, if that discrepancy bothers you you can sue me, we old war veterans have problems with memory and numbers some times.

The net effect of the support columns and horizontal slabs is that an infantryman on the bridge has close to ideal cover from flanking fire, as the thickness of the waist-high columns and the horizantal slab would my guess for sure stop anything up to about 100mm, although of course stone splinters could be a problem.

Another obvious place of cover is on the sidewalk underneath the bridge between the bank, and the first bridge support. Once you got in there the only way direct fire could touch you would be by ricochet, and it would have to be firing down the length of the bank. There are pock marks showing Red infantry figured that out during the war.

There also are pock marks on the bridge in lots of places from bullets, not too many as the DDR Germans fixed most of them. From the damage it seems like there was more fire on the German end of the bridge than anywhere else, but that's really a guess.

One of the really impressive things is how massive the bridge is. The stanchions (the things that hold the bridge up) are 2.5 - 3 meters thick, and it looks like granite. It would take some serious explosive to knock the thing down. Tank fire wouldn't do much but scratch it, I think.

The bridge is the highest bit of ground in the neighbourhood, although if there was a three story building you could shoot down onto the bridge without too much difficultly, super-easy along the length of the bridge, and from its sides alot harder due to the stone guard railings and statues.

But an important terrain fact about the bridge seems to be that, pretty much, if you are on ground level on either side of the bridge you can't really shoot onto the bridge. From the sides the columns/griffons/horizontal slab make it impossible, and from either end the arch of the bridge means a crawling man could make it about 1/3 to 1/2 way across the bridge, before some one prone on the other end could see him.

Washingtonplatz slopes downward towards the train station, so that the 2nd floor of the train station is roughly level with the highest point of the bridge. On the German side, the bridge is a little higher than the surrounding ground, except for one exception. (See below)

The river. The Spree does not curve as dramatically, at least now, as it does in the scenario. Looking at the river from the Soviet side, it's a very gentle curve on the right, for practical purposes the river runs perpendicular to the bridge for a good 300-400 meters.

On the left, again from the Soviet side, a fairly sharp curve comes fairly quickly, in about 70 paces. The curve here is towards the German side, so it would have been fairly easy for the Reds to set up flanking fire on the bridge to take advantage of the curve.

Another thing that is impressive is how short the ranges were. The Reichstag is about 500- 750 meters away, and a long LOS during the battle must have been 200 meters, and with smoke etc. I bet half that.

My first reaction when I realized how short the distances was, of course "How did the Reds get people across at those ranges?", followed shortly by "They must have just leveled the opposite bank, at those ranges assault guns could have picked out individual foxholes with ease."

Trees. Aside from one stunted oak on the German side, and a couple of what I think are acacias on the Soviet side, there are no trees left from the wartime period. From the picture and the way the trees that are there now, it really looks like the trees at during the time of the war were no cover. Just a string of shade trees along the bank at the upper edge, maybe 4 meters apart, each tree 10 - 15 centimeters thick at the base.

The Bank. Quite steep and definately meriting slope rating in the scenario. It flattens out a bit on the German side to the right, looking at the bank from the German POV, so there may be some grounds for vehicle passability to the bank 200-300 meters away from the bridge in that direction. Although it is obvious there has been major earth moving going on, that's guess work too.

At least today, the German side of the river is slightly higher than the Soviet side, although it's a difference of less than a meter. I would say that if the buildings had been standing, there would have been no terrain effect at all during the battle.

What is however obvious is that if you have a 3rd story window you can command the bridge and its approaches with ease. I'm sure that worked both ways.

There is a mound about 150 meters to the right, looking at the bridge from the German side, which pretty much is the highest bit of ground around. It's very small, maybe 30-50 meters in diameter. To me it looks like a hill made from wartime rubble, but I dunno for sure.

The photograph. There is a faded but still legible photograph and memorial in the lee of the bridge on the Soviet side, describing the history of the bridge in DDR language, how it was built in honor of German militarists and then destroyed in 1945.

But obviously the bridge wasn't fully destroyed, as the picture shows something like six or seven T-34/85s, and what looks like Su-152 or ISU-152 assault guns all over the bridge, and tons of war damage all around.

So all in all I would say Richie's scenario is awfully close to what I found on the ground, the only disconnect being the width of the river and the bridge - and that could well have changed due to post-war engineering.

I looked for the objective flags too, couldn't find them. But no problem, I walked the entire battlefield from memory.

[Kingfish]

Excellent! Now be a good lad and walk the countryside around Gavrus for me, only this time keep the measurements to inch/feet.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Great read Bigduke6. Last time I was there was many years before CM came out, but you helped me picture it.

[Richie]

Excellent write up! ...And your Moltke Bridge AAR is one of the best I've ever read!

T'was awkward transforming the bridge and the river for CM. In reality, the bridge lays diagonally across the river when all other landmarks are considered. Unfortunately the CMBB engine doesn't allow for diagonal bridges... so when considering the scale of other things and a need to adhere to the general lay of the land... there's always a lttle compromise!

Great Stuff BigDuke!

Photo depicts the German side of the bridge from the diplomatic quarter on 29th April 1945

[John Kettler]

Bigduke6,

Very nice ground truth presentation and analysis of the tactical impact thereof!

Richie,

I have that picture in a book about Russian war photographers, but never paid much attention to the bridge. Frankly, my attention was on the tanks, SUs, and towed guns.

Regards,

John Kettler