Recon ACs

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sergei:

Yes, I think so. However, as it failed, it essentially became recon by bang

If there are no survivors, how do they report their findings.... </font>

[Other Means]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sergei:

Yes, I think so. However, as it failed, it essentially became recon by bang

If there are no survivors, how do they report their findings.... </font>

[Grimly Fiendish]

This is great stuff, although putting it to good use may be difficult thanks to CM's abstraction.

When heading into an area where the enemy is know to be active (the typical CM situation), what might the variations to procedure have been, depending on force composition? In other words, in CM terms, armor vs armor, infy vs armor, armor vs, infy, infy vs infy. As someone commented, a lot depends on what you have, but what you are expecting must also play a role.

It's hard to compose a small force (under 2000 pts) that can (1) move and spot effectively and safely (2) hold off or kill tanks and (3) occupy and hold a flag. Too bad CM doesn't include standard mixes of vehicles, like a armored recon platoon, in the menu.

My opponents tend to favor Panthers, schrecks, and flamethrowers. Should I then probe with Greyhounds, available M3s, or Chaffees that can occasionally surprise and kill? (Forget leading with Shermans, that leads to teeth-gnashing and self-recrimination.) And if you lead with vehicles, how do you provide an infantry screen that can keep up in a 20-turn race to the flag?

A related issue is armored infantry practices. In TacOps, APCs and rifle squads advance together across clear terrain very effectively. In CM, all you get is halftracks at the objective and infantry hugging the dirt, in the open, halfway between the jump-off and the flag. I have better luck using halftracks like armored schoolbuses. Is there a trick to this?

[JasonC]

Dave - you don't need a cavalry force to scout for you. If you expect actual battle, particularly against an enemy with full tanks - let alone superior ones like Panthers - you have no business sending such light forces first. Not what they are designed for and not something they can do.

All force types must conduct their own battlefield recon out of their own organic elements, when actually in contact. It is not a specialist job. Cavalry units exist at a much higher echelon level to accomplish a different task, one they can actually perform, without ever deliberately facing such powerful opposition, let alone recklessly advancing when they believe it will be present.

As for armored infantry, if you try to import tac ops thinking of any kind it will uniformly fail. WW II era armored infantry is meant to perform *infantry* tasks for mechanized forces. In modern ops, practically everyone instead acts as armor, in WW II terms. Tac Ops also presents much larger, semi-operational areas. WW II era battlefields are much more compressed, and infantry (dismounted, leg infantry) plays a much larger role on it.

The right force to fight an enemy with Panthers and hidden schrecks is a combined arms force, and the right element to lead is dismounted infantry. Typically a full platoon traveling in a wedge or blob formation behind an isolated, leading, half squad "point". On "move to contact", with occasional links of "advance" over short patches of open.

And behind that point platoon you need the balance of at least a company, or tanks, or (the usual and paradigm case) both.

Leg infantry will spot Panthers without getting whole vehicles permanently killed. Leg infantry will walk over schrecks and discover them, while your vehicles are still out of range.

To stop the scouts, the enemy must fire. He will try to fire with a few stealthy shooters only. If that is all he has you need to be able to bull forward anyway. There is a whole bag of necessary tactics to accomplish that.

Here is one that isn't in the bag - charge everybody forward into unspotted areas mounted. Here is why it isn't in the bag - hidden PAK, your Panthers etc turn it into a big barbeque inside of two minutes.

The overall logic is chain of escalation. You reach deeper into your formation and force structure to get the right weapon to counter whatever the enemy has shown and used so far. When he commits most of what he has, you then know where his force is and what it consists of, and battlefield recon is over. So you transition to deliberate attack.

"But I can't race 2000m across open ground against Panthers inside of 20 minutes". Well duh. Undoable missions aren't accomplished. Your choice of tactic will not change whether they are accomplished, only how high the stack of bodies gets before you throw in the towel.

Infantry advances want covered routes, not the whole way but cover along the route. Ranges above about 500m are a form of cover, in interaction with even minor other terrain (anything but a billiard table, basically). Because infantry is rather stealthy - that is at least half its entire reason to exist.

If you know there is nothing there, you can ride. You can ride tanks or you can ride halftracks. Or you can march along on Move, everybody making 100m a minute, no extra command delays etc.

But if there is likely to be something there, you can't ride. Get out. A reserve can ride, but only because it is staying in places where you know there is no enemy. Anybody expecting actual contact has to get out. And then infantry goes first. Tanks overwatch from 200m behind the leading infantry. They advance the limits of their LOS, not their physical location.

A typical drill is tanks reach some LOS blocking line and see to the next. Infantry crosses to the next LOS block, tanks just overwatching. Once infantry is in the next LOS block, the tanks advance behind it, but not around it. As infantry reaches the other side of the LOS block, it reports back what it sees. Then and only then, the tanks nose around the blockage and advance their LOS limits across the next field or ridge. Then and only then, now that the limit of the tank's LOS is ahead of the physical location of the infantry, the infantry steps out again. Packet amounts leading, dribbling across the vulnerable areas, not all in one big go.

Eventually you hit something. If you have conformed to the drill, the tanks can see anything blowing up the infantry. Your infantry has spotted enemy tanks before your own tanks have sauntered into their LOS. Most of your infantry is either in cover or can reach it rapidly. People go stationary and start pulling triggers. Tanks stalk things they can kill, infantry skulks away from anything they can't overmatch right away.

There is no razzle dazzle substitute for this drill. There is no technological fix. You find the enemy only by creating a threat that he must fire to stop. You deal with that fire by firing back, not by anything that can confer invulnerability on the lead elements the moment they are shot at - because there isn't any such thing. The protection of the point is the retaliatory fire of the main body. Nothing else helps.

[Grimly Fiendish]

That certainly conforms to my experience: you need to use what you have, and combine it, and to have useful equipment you need to have some idea what you're facing. In CMAK, you could waste a lot of time setting up QBs that fail or turn ridiculous, because players have not communicated, and the Allies have set up with armored recon (Greyhounds and and close support Shermans) while the Germans have invested in Panthers. Operationally, that would result in a pullback and a call for backup. That's why I wish for template TOEs, so players could more easily say, "OK, let's do a typical light armor vs light armor, or typical mech vs mech, or a typical heavy armor vs heavy armor." Now we will have CMC, but not for the southern or western fronts.

Still, I was wondering about typical historical procedures, not CMAK ones, to translate to CMAK terms. For instance, say you had a standard recon platoon, and it was looking for something not too nasty: a couple of PzIIIs or IVs at most. You've got jeeps, infy, Greyhounds, and a few Shermans.

Which goes out first? (After the infy I mean.)

(BTW, there's a CMBB thread that answers my halftrack question very well.)

[JasonC]

After the leading infantry come the Shermans and the rest of the infantry. Doesn't matter if you have light armor in the force or not. If there is opposition ahead, the light armor trails, in reserve and covering flanks.

Late, after the enemy AT network is smashed and his tanks are dead, you can turn them loose to help your infantry. You can occasionally keyhole one Greyhound someplace to cut a line of infantry retreat, or to hose one enemy MG with its own. But that is not their main purpose and they are just filling in for a Sherman that will do the same job five times better.

The other thing you don't see in CM with cavalry relates to John's point about dismounted scouts, taken to a further setting. There are as many men in a cavalry platoon as in an infantry platoon, basically. And they are as heavily armed when they get out. The vehicles pack lots of extra firepower, but it is extra and optional.

In CM, the mortar team has 5 men and they just haul ammo. In real life they have M-1 carbines. In CM you can't put a scoped rifle or a bazooka or a BAR in a jeep MG. In real life they did, as a matter of course. In CM, you can put a radio FO on the back of a Greyhound without cover. In real life, they called missions from the battalion HMCs firing indirect. A real cavalry platoon could put 6 vehicles turret down or the equivalent, and still have 6 flex 50 cals barely clearing the cover. Along with 3 mortars, scoped rifles, BARs. Plenty of infantry firepower.

They did not use that to banzai. But it shows why you never would, really. If you could get all of that with anything like its real effectiveness in CM, would you throw it away to find one PAK and a couple MGs? No. You'd use it defensively that way, and then pick it all up and plop the same defensive firepower down someplace a full 3km up the road in about 5 minutes. That's very useful. Not banzai use, but very useful.

[Grimly Fiendish]

OK. Supposing you have only Shermans for vehicles, say 3 or 5 or 7. In each case, would you put 2 in front and 1 or 3 or 5 some 200m behind? That is to say, was the weight always primarily in the rear? Or is the 2-tank point only for operational recon? This matters because contact between a recon force and an enemy force makes a good jumping-off point for a battle.

Would there always only be 1 point for up to a company of tanks---would a company ever split up or lead with 2 points and have 8-11 tanks behind both, as infantry might on defense? I'm trying to get a sense of working priorities, because it is so easy to be tempted into trying to do too much with what you have.

(Too bad CM doesn't bother to model dismounted recon, because it seems like it would be easy: just split a Greyhound into a vehicle and gunner and an HQ team, and make the vehicle unable to fire or move, or fire AND move, especially if the commander gets beyond earshot.)

[John Kettler]

Dave Stockhoff,

There's an old military principle known as Economy of Force. It says you assign only what you absolutely have to in order to accomplish a given military task, but it also means deliberately limiting the exposure of the whole force by advancing only a portion of it into potential reach of the foe. Let's take a pure U.S. Sherman company, which we'll optimistically assume is at full strength.

2 x Sherman (Company HQ) + 3 x Tank Platoons of (1 Platoon Leader + 4 Shermans)= 17 Shermans

The smallest force you'd ever see deployed for recon, barring breakdown, combat loss or grave emergency, would be half a platoon, or 2 Shermans, under command of the Assistant Platoon Leader.

Typically, though, you'd expect to see a platoon.

The name of the game is always mutual support, with a larger unit nearby if needed but preferably

far enough back so as not to be under hostile observation and fire.

In use as reinforcement for infantry, though, the usual scale of attachment was a tank platoon in support of an infantry company, but there the tanks typically wouldn't be leading. With two up and one back, the attack force would have 2 Shermans with one platoon and 3 with the other. On the defensive, the entire platoon would probably be sited behind the infantry positions as a powerful counterattack force.

The same basic approach was true of Soviet practice in the 1980s, too, with a tank company preceded by a tank platoon and a pair of BRDM-2s,

these trailed by a tank battalion fronted by a tank company with an attached motor rifle platoon, in turn followed a tank regiment screened by a Lead March Security Detachment consisting of a tank battalion, a motor rifle company, a brace each of SA-9/SA-13 mobile SAMs and ZSU-23/4, and

a battery of M1974 2S1 122mm SP guns.

In both major examples, the object is to be able to identify enemy positions and strength, brush aside weaker forces or if outgunned, fix stronger ones long enough to bring up superior combat power, in order to smash them. It is literally a battle to gain information, which is why it's called combat reconnaissance.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Grimly Fiendish]

Excellent help, yes. I usually approach a battle with the intent to gain info, but at some point I learn the enemy's composition, or the imperative becomes "kill the Panther before it kills you," or it becomes a flag brawl. The next stage is either mopping up or desperate attacks, flag grabs, and "how much can I save.' It's hard to maintain a disciplined approach when opposing forces are equal by definition; thus my interest in some kind of structure. JasonC's drills are useful too.

When are tanks supporting infantry, and when are infantry supporting tanks? I get 1 platoon armor attached to a company infy. But what was usual for armor supported by infy? In CM terms, about a company of men could probably ride on a company of tanks. Did they generally ride until they encountered woods, dismount, check the area, saddle up and move on? or did they stay on board until they had contact?

(I know the Germans did this at Bastogne as part of their Christmas morning assault from the west, and I have wondered why Citadel Schwerpunkt wasn't set up the same way. Presumably that battle was about a screen thrown up to stop a probing armor company, but why was the company probing without infy? Lack of tree cover?)

[JasonC]

Tanks supported by infantry are represented in CM by the "armor" force type with a mechanized division parent. You can take the entire point total as armor if you want. Or you can mix in infantry etc. Entirely up to you.

Russians would go as high as a company of tanks to a company or less of infantry. In CM terms, 10 T-34s with 2 SMG platoons riding them would be entirely normal. Obviously the riders are not expected to be decisive with that sort of force mix. They don't need to be - they just need to scout for the tanks, check out terrain they can't enter, etc.

US armor divisions also used a 1 to 1 ratio, but then tended to task them 1:2 or 2:1. And sometimes would cross attach a regimental combat team from an ID to get extra infantry. A tank heavy task force might have 50 armored vehicles or more with only a single company of infantry.

The typical German ratio in the PDs was 1 armor to 2 infantry. But they varied the tasking widely, sometimes sending the whole panzer regiment with only a modest group of mounted Pz Gdrs (in SPWs) for infantry support, and sometimes sending a Pz Gdr regiment with as little as one company of StuGs or Pz Jgrs. (That is "combined arms" in CM terms - the other is "armor").

The whole point of KGs, combat commands, the organic brigade structure of tank and mech corps, was to provide flexibility in tasking, so the force mix could change to fit the terrain, enemy, and mission.

Combined arms does not consist of "total dose" thinking, just throw a bit of everything at the enemy and hope some of it sticks. The point is to generate lopsided match ups, the rocks that beat scissors. And sometimes the way you get that is to overload one arm, in favorable circumstances for it - e.g. full tanks in open steppe, or infantry at night in woods.

A bad commander is one who gives all his subordinates exactly equal force mixes each with exactly proportional "units slices", and parallel missions. A good commander is one who decides on a point of main effort and a combined arms means suited to his plan, tasks his sub-units accordingly, etc.

There is also an issue of absolute scale. For armor to have its real effects, you need a company of the stuff. Less than that just doesn't act like armor. It lacks the robustness, ability to overload single ATGs, ability to isolate positions by fire while others keep going, etc. Penny packets of AFVs may help stiffen a defense, but when attacking they are pretty useless. They do not change the form of the attack, which is the same as an infantry division would deliver without them present. It takes a company to produce a real "tank attack" effect.

As for the Kursk scenario, it represents a breakthrough exploitation. It was quite common for the panzers to lunge 5 km ahead of the rest of the force when they punched a hole. They are meant to smash a way through. You don't try that against a deliberate defense with mines and trenches and the works. But that isn't the defense they face. Instead it is a second line AT position strung across steppe trying to slow them down.

Initial breakthroughs with armor sometimes sent the tanks first, but with 50 of them to a kilometer of front. You don't worry about finding the 4 ATGs on the same frontage when you have 50 tanks. You just drive, and kill anything that messes with you. Doesn't work against an AT minefield, though, since those don't care about your firepower.

[Grimly Fiendish]

OK, that's good. Thanks! I knew armor needs to be massed to be effective---you learn that lesson is any good simulation---but I hadn't considered HOW massed. Perhaps you need about 3000 points of "armored division" to do an armor battle properly—anything less than that, you may as well pick an ID with support or just use as little armor as possible. I understand now. I've been mostly involved in 2000-point QBs, and things don't always work out the way it seems they should. Tanks turn out to be really vulnerable.

It's been my experience that at "heavy" tree coverage and above (on a random map), tanks need lots of infantry protection; at "moderate" or below, infantry need lots of tank protection---otherwise, the infy might not be able to cross open areas to their objective. Is that a realistic assessment, CM-wise? (Let's say I'm picking forces for a QB.)

Given JasonC's description of how armies had standard TOEs and ratios and then attached other units or violated those ratios in practice, is it not realistic to take some rough standard for a division type and add platoons and companies and batteries to it (in addition to subtracting random casualties etc.) to get a plausible "task force"? I know I can "do whatever I want," but that's not really satisfying or instructive. Also, you tend to get a system creep, whereby over a series of QBs you and your opponent reach for lager and larger guns. I'd like to find a way to stay grounded . . .

About tank riders not suffering from small arms fire: I did a CMBO scenario for the Christmas Day '44 assault I mentioned, in which about a company of Panzers took a company of PzGs on the road to hell. (They tried to overrun at dawn the 1st Airborne backed by a few tank destroyers and a few Shermans.) I don't know what the difference between CM and RL was exactly, but the Allies always blew the PzGs off the Panzers with their mortars, yet accounts don't mention mortars at all. I had to delete them to stop it. I also found that tank-riding didn't work out well in CMBO and haven't tried it since.

JasonC, am I missing something about the situation? Or does CMBO exaggerate this effect?

[JasonC]

The point of tank riding is not to stay on the tank decks down to point blank range and then jump off and eat the defenders while under fire. It isn't a sergeant rock comic book idea.

Instead the idea is simply to present a fire dilemma to the defenders. If they fire at long range, the range is too far to hurt the riders seriously. Yes they drop off, but then they get into cover and rally, basically unhurt. Fire from a few MGs at 400m for a few minutes is not going to kill a company, any way you slice it. And the attackers then see where the fire came from, and toss a mess of HE at the shooters from the tanks. After the shooters are well and truly dead the whole attack keeps coming.

If on the other hand the defenders hold their fire to skulk from the tanks, the riders get close, drop off into cover here and there, and then work their way into the same cover the defenders are in, a few packets at a time. With all the tanks and the rest of the riders standing by to blow away anything found.

It doesn't really matter which the defenders do. The tanks kill them either way, it is just a matter of how they want it.

As for the size fight needed to use armor, 3000 will show it better no doubt, but 2000 can also do so readily if - as I keep saying - you take the "armor" force type. 10 T-34s don't cost much more than 1000 points, and their riders can be as cheap as 154, or if you want a full SMG company, 222. One FO is plenty for this sort of attack. So you can easily get the whole thing in 1500 points - you just spend 2/3rds of those points on armor.

A typical German version might take a single motorized Pz Gdr company, one armored Pz Gdr platoon to get a few SPWs to move heavy weapons, 2 platoons of Panzers (or 3 of StuGs), one FO, a few added teams or varied bits of light armor or HE chuckers. Overall 2000, half of it spent on just the armor. If they had 3000, they'd add a third Panzer platoon and extra independent Pz Gdrs platoons - more tank-infantry teams, in other words - and maybe a 2nd FO.

Just get out of your head the idea that there is anything "normal" about combined arms, or that the budgets it gives for armor are canonical. They simply aren't. That is how one kind of KG attacks, but not how an armor-heavy KG attacks. (It fits e.g. Russian "Mech" more than Russian "Tank"). Armor heavy means armor force type, which is there for a reason.

Similarly in CMAK, fighting in the desert or Tunisia, you don't build a force around an infantry battalion. The tanks are the main thing, supplimented by towed guns. Infantry is a minor afterthought in that theater, unless the terrain is high and rocky.

As for the environments, I find infantry advances just fine in moderate trees. Farmland reduces the amount of trees you get with the same setting and rural increases it, though. Infantry is strongest in urban or moderate rural to heavy anything but farmland. It is also stronger relative to armor as infantry AT improves - a force with schrecks or bazookas can do a lot more by winning the infantry war than a force with only ATRs and demo charges.

[Grimly Fiendish]

The problems I had with tank riding in CMBO probably were caused by small maps and therefore close ranges---the PC I had back when I played CMBO was slow and kept the map size down.

The forces used were small and rarely involved a whole company of anything, regardless of force type.

Thanks, everybody, for all your answers!

[John Kettler]

Dave Stockhoff,

I believe there's another big difference between CM and real life. In CM, the tank riders receive no cover benefit whatsoever for the several tons of turret between them and much of the incoming small arms fire and shell/mortar fragments. This is a result of game engine limitations associated with something called dynamic cover, which is also the reason that troops behind any AFV other than a burning, destroyed one receive no cover benefit, even though it's easy to demonstrate this practice at least as far back as the invasion of Poland.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Grimly Fiendish]

That makes sense.

[joethejet]

Wait, let me make sure I understand. If I have an infantry unit standing with a tank between them and an enemy MG, there is no benefit to my infantry?

What about tanks? I have used dead (but not burning) tanks to "shield" my still alive tanks. Is there no benefit to that either?

Thanks,

Jet

[Dook]

Originally posted by joethejet:

Wait, let me make sure I understand. If I have an infantry unit standing with a tank between them and an enemy MG, there is no benefit to my infantry?

Correct.

Originally posted by joethejet:

What about tanks? I have used dead (but not burning) tanks to "shield" my still alive tanks. Is there no benefit to that either?

Thanks,

Jet

Correct.

As John K noted, tanks provide no cover by themselves - for infantry or other tanks. They exist as points with no volume for purposes of cover calculations. When they brew up, on the other hand, the smoke does provide cover.

Apparently, this is going to change for CMx2. Tanks will block line of fire, although not line of sight. I think I got that right, but you might want to wait for someone who pays more attention to the CMSF boards to confirm.

[Kingfish]

As John K noted, tanks provide no cover by themselves - for infantry or other tanks. They exist as points with no volume for purposes of cover calculations. When they brew up, on the other hand, the smoke does provide cover.

Just to clarify, smoke does not provide cover, only concealment. In CM the term "cover" means something that actually stops or limits the incoming enemy fire, i.e a physical barrier such as being behind a stone wall or inside a house. "Concealment" means something that blocks LOS, and thus prevents enemy fire from penetrating. Smoke is a good example, as is thick fog, night or tall summer wheat.

[joethejet]

Well, that explains why my son was able to hit my Pz III's so easily when I *thought* he could only see a small part of the tank!

Something good to know for sure.