Time well spent during battle!

[Mad Russian]

Here is an excerpt that came from the 3rd Armored Division website. It tells of an action that took place by A Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment. There have been multiple discussions about time management during a battle and this AAR is one of the best I've seen relating what happened during an attack.

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Working in two teams we leap-frogged aggressively and cleared out buildings on both sides of the street. Flushing out a number of frightened German paratroopers we continued on until we came to an intersection, which was covered by a German anti-tank gun. I sent Mike Lucas back to where the tanks were, which had halted at the beginning of the village, to retrieve the platoon radio that had been on the deck of one of the tanks. Mike returned a half hour later with a tank and with word that shrapnel had riddled the radio useless.

By this time I discovered that each of us had less than a full clip of ammunition for our M-1's. I sent two men back along the street to recover empty clips that had been ejected. Borrowing a machine gun belt of .30 caliber from the tank, we reloaded the recovered empty clips. Because the tank commander dared not expose the tank to the anti-tank gun, we sat there for several hours before being relieved.

Thus, on 12 December we were able to take the objective with a force 20 times larger than our original reconnaissance patrol that tried unsuccessfully two days earlier. But the victory this day was not without casualties. We had another eight men killed and six wounded.

A Company's total casualties for the three-day affair were 16 killed, 33 wounded, 15 evacuated because of exhaustion and one self-inflicted gunshot wound. Thus our casualties totaled 65 or 43%.

There was a tremendous amount of heroism displayed by the men of the Company and the Army recognized this. As a result Lt. Berlin received the Distinguished Service Cross (he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor), nine men received the Silver Star and seventeen Bronze Star medals were awarded. To cap it all off the entire Company received a cluster to The Distinguished Unit Badge, or Presidential Unit Citation as we called it, having received its original one for its actions in breaching the Siegfried Line the previous September.

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For those wishing to read the entire account of the battle the web site is:

http://www.3ad.org/testimonials/wwii/pacios/wwii_36air_pacios.htm

Panther Commander

[MikeyD]

So applying this to CM, no more "eye of God" movement orders from above. If you want tank support you've got to dispatch someone back a few blocks to ask for it!

A few days ago I attempted something vaguely like this. I tried playing a game only on level one (though I'll admit to level 2 on occassion) and viewing only by "+"ing through the available units. AND I didn't memorize the map first. It's really disconcerting hear distant gunfire on the other side of a row of houses and not be entirely sure what route to direct your tanks through the maze of intervening streets to get to your troops!

[Slappy]

I think it also supports the ammo system in CM pretty well. No real resupply in the 40min window, but you can scrounge enough rounds to take potshots now and again.

[Andreas]

Lies, all lies. There never were no frightenend German paratroopers. They were all steel-chinned elite hampsters. Bah.