Learned my lesson on airpower

[MikeyD]

I've been unable to understand why people on the board mistrusted airpower in CM. I never had a problem with it.

Well, a couple days ago I constructed a simple desert scenario where a few pzIIIs & infantry with the support of a couple ME110s attack a fortified Brit position. The first run-through the ME110s totally obliterate the Brit position! It was spectacular! The second run-through the same ME110 bomb the crap out of their own troops in equally spectacular fashion.

So... THAT's what y'all meant by airpower being unreliable!

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Yes, airpower is deadly. Sometimes, its even deadly to the enemy.

[John1966]

CAS!!!!!

Just everybody keep their head down...

[birdstrike]

Some lessons are learned the hard way.

In a recent battle versus the AI, two enemy aircraft wasted four of my five AT-guns by just strafing them - without any of my guns having fired a single shot. WAAAHHH :mad: :mad: :mad:

Never came to my mind that strafing could be that devastating! Makes you really change your mind about those guns-only planes...

[MikeyD]

As frustrating as those planes may be what keeps you coming back is the fact that they're a genuine hoot to see in action, even if they are killing off your own troops! The kind'a stuff you replay a few times just for the fun of watching it. Especially the big playload fighter-bombers. I was disappointed some of the bigger U.S. twin engine ground attack planes didn't make it into the game. i was hoping for real mayhem!

[CombinedArms]

I hadn't had too many problems with planes until a British Hurricane killed my Churchill Croc in a scenario where the Croc was the absolute pivot of the whole attack--an urban battle where the Germans otherwise had me outgunned. :mad:

He also blasted an HT and killed all the passengers riding on the vehicles. :eek:

From that moment early in the battle, I was just hanging on by my thumbs. My opponent awarded the Hurricane pilot the Knight's Cross (with Oak Leaves for the HT). Somehow my seemingly invulnerable and almighty (against infantry) Crocs always seem to die an early and strange death.

[DEY]

I've never ever had a friendly fire problem with aircraft in BB as long as the pilots were at least vet exp.

The most amazing thing I had ever seen in either in BB was what must have been a friendly fire mistake by russian aircraft in the "BORISOVKA STATION" scenerio. It was getting towards the end of the game and I was getting the crap kicked outa me playing the germans. All my guns were knocked out and the russians still had most of it's infantry and about 4 or 5 t34's. the T34's had moved over onto the east side of the map and drove into the village in front of those two wharehouses with the big map. Two was on the road driving towards the church and the rest where sitting on the road or in and around the little houses. Mostly all of the remaining russian infantry also moved into this same area. I figured my goose was cooked, then all of a sudden there was a screaming roar and what seemed like about 10 huge explosions running in long line up the road, I was setting right there at ground level when it happen. It blew the heck outa about 6 of the little houses and knockout all of the remaning russian tanks and killied almost all of the russian infantry.

I loaded up the battle in the scenerio in the editor and the only plane that could have done that was the russian PE-2FT dive bomber.

That was the coolest thing I've ever seen happen in the thus far.

By the way the russian piliot exp is regular

[McMiguel]

Well, my own RAF pilots obliterated 5 out of 6 British AT guns, allowing my opponent to advance unhindered. No more aircraft for me

[Redwolf]

Just for the recond: nobody (well, nobody serious) has anything against friendly fire the way the original post describes: make two runs, hit the enemy in one, hit friendly troops in the next.

No problem there.

But consider the last past before this one: the pilots would know who would defend and who would attack. So would aircrafts belonging to the defender bomb dug-in AT guns facing the direction the enemy is coming from? No. Would planes belonging to the advancing side bomb tanks and infantry slowing crossing an open field towards the direction the enemy should be in? No.

Would these "no" example be absolutely impossible? No, it is not absolutely impossible, but super-rare. In CMBB and CMAK they are not rare, the friendly fire code is just totally random, there is no tuning of probabilities to produce more friendly fire where friendly fire would be more probable in reality.

[rune]

redwolf,

Wrong. let's look at the book 7 Roads to Hell, written by one of the people who was there.

When the 101st was defending bastogne, a regiment defending Bastogne was bombed EVERYDAY by friendly aircraft when it was flying weather. EVERYDAY. His own unit hid in the woods because they were afraid of getting hit by their own aircraft.

So, do I believe a combat veteran from the times? Yep. Do I believe it was super rare? Nope. In band of Brothers, another unit of the 101st in defensive positions was also attacked by friendly aircraft.

On D-Day the Inns of Court Regiment - a Recce Regiment equipped with armoured cars and infantry in half tracks - were given the task of bypassing the fight for the beaches and heading inland to sieze and/or observe certain strategic road junctions and bridges. This would provide vital information on enemy troop strengths and ability to deploy counter attacks. A major part of the operation was wrecked, vehicles destroyed and lives lost due to persistant attacks by Thunderbolts who ignored agreed ID procedures - recognition panels and coloured smoke.

In "A Drop Too Far", Colonel Frost's autobiography, he recalls the time in Tunisia when under attack by the 10th Panzer Division. Things looked bleak for the unfortunate and lightly-armed paras - until the Luftwaffe showed up and bombed the attacking Germans to bits.

From a forum:

I taught AFV recognition courses in my regiment. I do NOT have a source for this, but the course material specifically said that tank casualties (I presume Canadian, but possibly all Allies) in NWE were 40% due to friendly fire incidents.

An Amry Report

Title: Friendly Fire on Today's Battlefield

Author: Major A.C. Koehler, United States Army

Friendly Fire Incidents by Type

Conflict Air Artillery Ground Antiaircraft

WWII, Korea

& Vietnam (3:104) 37% 36% 22% 5%

37% of friendly fire casualties came from friendly fire, in case that can't be read well.

Here is another veteran's account:

http://www.tankbooks.com/tanksfor/chap15.htm

Another case:

Unfortunately the commander of the regiment who was to lead the advance to Chambois did not communicate his intentions clearly to the guide supplied by the French resistance. The Koszutski battle group moved due east to a village called Les Champeaux astride the main Trun-Vimoutiers highway, the German escape route to the River Seine. This small force, one armoured regiment and an infantry battalion, had penetrated deep into the German rear areas where it was repeatedly attacked by Royal Air Force Spitfires and Typhoons whose pilots had been briefed to bomb and strafe all movement in an area known to be occupied by the enemy. Despite casualties from friendly fire, the battle group disrupted the German retreat and helped to stem the counterattack by 9th SS Panzer Div.

There are hundred of hits on the internet for WWII Friendly fire, just pick the ones with aircraft.

Rune

[MikeyD]

Remember, even in Iraq with all the high tech gizmos a fair percentage of Allied casualties were friendly fire airstrikes.

I recall back in '91 I had videotaped a TV show while at work. The tape started as it usually does with commercials and TV promos. One was for 'Nightline' and the promo's graphic was Maverick missile nose-camera footage swooping in on a target. Just lasted two seconds, but something looked odd so I rewound and replayed it in slow-mo. Most of the footage was a fuzzy IR image until the very last frame which I could just make out to be the upper-left engine deck of a British Challenger I tank! The missile struck right behind the turret! I truely doubt ABC news knew what they had, and there's a good chance nobody else who saw he promo noticed.

[flamingknives]

Seconding rune's comments:

Having read books on 7th armoured division (Desert Rats) in NWE (Patrick Delaforce) and the 5th (?) Seaforth Highlanders in the same area, it seems that, especially on the break out advances from Normandy to Belgium, friendly fire attacks by allied aircraft were exceedingly common.

"An Army at Dawn", by Rick Atkinson lists numerous cases of friendly fire by allied aircraft, to the extent that US troops would fire on any aircraft, without bothering to identify it first.

Pilots, flying from airfields at least tens, sometimes a hundred miles back from a front line consisting of multiple Armies. They are not necessarily going to know what any particular company or battalion is doing when they take off, let alone when they get there. In addition, the enemy is notoriously unhelpful when it comes to notifying the other side of forthcoming maneuvers and counter-attacks.

[MikeyD]

And fighters escorting bombers over Germany would often do freelance ground attack on anything that caught their eye on the way home. These planes in particular wouldn't know who was where when.

[rune]

An interesting army report stated that a lot of friendly fire incidents were caused by rear echelon troops. They would plant the ID markers "just in case", and the pilots were told anything to the east [whatever direction was appropriate] of the markers was fair game. Hence the frontline troops were then hit, another report said a lot of casualties was caused by the falling brass.

Read yet another that stated Monty called off all airstrikes in the gap at Falaise EXCEPT unarmed recon flights due to the amount of friendly fire incidents on his own troops. However, would like a secondary source on this one.

Bottom line, friendly fire was quite common, didn't matter if on the attack, on the defense, travelling a known road, or just sitting around.

Rune

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by redwolf:

there is no tuning of probabilities to produce more friendly fire where friendly fire would be more probable in reality.

Oh yes there is a tuning probability. Maybe not for QB's...since I've never played one I can't comment on them. But for made scenarios you can absolutely determine the accuracy of your pilots.

The more experience you give them the less likely that they will attack friendly forces. I normally give my pilots a veteran rating. That allows a "normal" amount of friendly fire, which for me means, about 50% of the time.

Read some of the other posts here if you don't think that is reasonable. But if that level doesn't suite you, make them crack, or even elite. The higher you go the more accurate their attacks. I ran an extensive series of tests on the FF issue and found that it simply comes down to pilot experience. The type scenario doesn't matter, infantry or armor fights don't matter. The only thing that mattered was the pilot experience level.

I do exclusively historical/semi-historical scenarios and I needed to know how to get an air strike force that had a reasonable amount of success. Not guaranteed since with the CAS there is no guarantee. I also needed to be able to model that the CAS struck me. In some RL fights this happened so I needed to be able to model that in the scenario.

So I did the series of tests. They are quite simple put the troops of both sides on completely different sides of the map seperated by LOS blocking terrain. Then bring on the planes. If a plane is going to attack the wrong side he will hit your main tank in a second. If not then he did good.

Bottom line is, you want accurate attacks, get good pilots.

Panther Commander

[ August 05, 2004, 07:47 AM: Message edited by: Panther Commander ]

[CombinedArms]

I just did some tests that suggest that at least under certain conditions, friendly fire incidents are pretty rare, even with regular pilots. I did the tests before reading Panther Commander's post. It might be interesting for us to compare notes.

Anyway, I didn't want to spend a lot of time with setting up a map, so I just took a tank firing course I'd set up with ten Panthers facing ten Sherman76's on separated tracks and added for regular P-47Ds to the unit list. And I added a tree barrier across the middle of the tracks so the tanks couldn't kill each other before the planes got there. Each was now in its own hermetically sealed track. Then I ran the battle three times. As you all know, the P47D makes two separate bombing runs, one for its 500 lb bomb and a second for its two 1000 pound bombs. On none of these bomb runs (8 per battle) in any of the three battles was there a friendly fire incident. None of the strafing runs produced friendly fire, either.

With no FF at all in three battles, I figured I might be skewing things by having all ten Panthers lined up on one side on the separate tracks. So I swapped 5 Panthers with 5 Shermans on one half of the course. Then I ran the battle again...no FF attacks that time either. So for four battles with 20 hostile tanks each and four planes, there were no FF incidents. It makes me wonder if the FF incidents we report are in fact statistically rarer than they seem to be, because the impact is so shocking when it does happen.

I did come up with a bunch of other interesting observations. One is that each of the four battles produced a single Panther kill (no more, no less). Another is that immoblizations are much more common than kills (2 or 3 per battle--ten total). Also, the death of tank commanders was very common--as many as six in one battle and 17 total (out of 40 tanks.) Another point is that many of the immobs and TC kills came on strafing runs--at least half, though I didn't keep a careful count.

It's possible that the grid-like structure I used made things clearer for the pilots than in real battle conditions, but I'm still inclined to believe that a claim like 50% FF incidents is vastly exaggerated....

[ August 05, 2004, 10:41 AM: Message edited by: CombinedArms ]

[MikeyD]

My only suggestion for a variable is to set the Shermans moving in the open. Mabe movement attracts the planes?

Remember, I was the guy who never got any friendly fire incidents until recently, myself!

[ August 05, 2004, 11:29 AM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

My only suggestion for a variable is to set the Shermans moving in the open. Mabye movment attracts the planes.

Remember, I was the guy who never got any friendly fire incidents until recently, myself!

I just tried this (before seeing your post) and it didn't make an apparent difference. I took out the tracks and divided the map into four separate open squares, divided by ridges and thick trees. Panthers and Shermans were in platoons of five in the squares in the pattern:

5 Pan / 5 Sh

5 Sh / 5 Pan

Same regular four P47Ds. No friendly fire--all bombs on German targets. This time there were 2 tank kills, 1 gun damaged, 3 dead TCs. The Shermans were moving freely about in their squares but attracted no fire.

Remember I 'm the guy who lost his Churchill Croc and is still moaning about it--but had few problems before that. I think we may tend to remember the rare FF incidents because they're so painful...

[ August 05, 2004, 10:53 AM: Message edited by: CombinedArms ]

[Sergei]

Could you test what happens if you replace the Panthers with German infantry?

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by Sergei:

Could you test what happens if you replace the Panthers with German infantry?

Good suggestion. I removed the 10 Panthers and replaced them with two companies of German Rifle '44s. I added a cliff line along the borders between sectors to keep the infantry inside their box and put a small patch of scattered trees in the center of each square. I put a company each of German inf in diagonally facing squares, placing about half the inf in the scattered trees and half in the open.

This time there was in fact one FF incident--a 500 lb bomb was dropped on a Sherman, causing one TC casualty. On the other hand, the effect on the Germans was pretty devastating. 138 casualties, 88 OK. One whole platoon was wiped out by a pair of 1000 pound bombs landing together. I issued no movement orders but by the end of the 20 turn battle, all surviving German units were huddled in the scattered tree patches.

It does seem as if facing infantry presents a slightly more challenging situation for CAS. There were some scouting passes without fire, for example, which I didn't notice when it was all tanks. Still, the vast preponderance of fire was directed against the German infantry. Next test, when I get the chance. will put all the inf in scattered trees to start....

[CombinedArms]

OK--I did a test this time with all of the German infantry in the scattered trees in the center of their areas. As a test, one platoon was in the woods along the border of one segement.

This time the P47s made several scouting passes before starting to bomb. And there was a significantly higher incidence of FF--four bombs dropped on the Allied Shermans. This resulted in one dead Sherman and one TC casualty.

On the other hand, the Germans were eventually found and the casualties for them were exactly the same as for the previous test: 88 men OK; 128 casualties. The platoon in the woods were never spotted, but the troops in scattered trees were eventually found and pasted, though only after several scouting passes.

I'm feeling like this last test is my most realistic yet, and it also seems to me to suggest that we've got a fairly sophisticated and realistic model here: when targets are large and in the open, FF incidents are quite rare. When the enemy is smaller and harder to spot, and when Allied targets feature big vehicles as opposed to infantry in woods, FF incidents are going to be more common. Still, the majority of fire will still go against the enemy. (In this case 8 bombs to 4, and two thirds of the damage points.)

A final test might be to up my pilots to vet and see if they avoid FF even under challenging conditions.

[CombinedArms]

Well, vet crews may not be the answer, either. This was my highest incidence yet of FF--5 bombs on the Allied Shermans; one tank killed and 4 TC casualties (TC casualties are quite expensive, BTW). This led to a draw in the game with the loss of the Sherman and TCs actually outweighing slightly the 101 German inf casualties.

This last setup might require more testing to get a sense of the true proportion of FF incidents. In the earlier tests, the FF were clearly going to be rare, but here we'd need more testing to see what the real proportions are....

[Redwolf]

Reminds me to ask, rune, do you have an data about total number of missions flown for those missions gone wrong you listed?

Mind you, we need to compute a probability here.

[rune]

Will see what I can dig up. However, that doesn't change the amount of casualties inflicted by friendly fire. Also, have to eliminate heavy bombers and light bombers, raids behind enemy lines, airfield strafing, etc. I doubt just a breakdown exists.

I just went through some veteran accounts, and there are a lot of mentions of friendly fire by american aircraft.

Company I, 413th Infantry, 104th Infantry Division

1 Dec 1944: Germany. A U.S. Air Corps P-51 bombed the position occupied by my infantry platoon, killed three of my men and wounded me.

According to one web site, 21% of casualties were caused by friendly fire in WWII. So say 8-10 percent were caused by aircraft. This is for US forces only.

The problems with Air-Ground support got so bad in North africa, that on 21 July 1943, a new manual had to be put out. FM 100-20 stated:

Finally, FM 100-20 argued that close air support must be used prudently because "in the zone of contact, missions against hostile units are most difficult to control, are most expensive, and are, in general, least effective. Targets are small, well-dispersed, and difficult to locate. In addition, there is always a considerable chance of striking friendly forces.

To see how bad things really got in Africa, read:

http://www.usaaf.net/has/jops/cas.htm

general bradley had to say this about air-ground co-ordination in Europe.

"we went into France almost totally untrained in air-ground cooperation".

Eisenhower himself had to comment on friendly fire incidents: "Unfortunately, perfection in the employment of comparatively new tactics, such as this close-support carpet bombing, is attainable only through the process of trial and error, and these regrettable losses were part of the inevitable price of experience"

So there you have it, veteran account, commanders, field manuals, all saying friendly fire by aircraft was a problem.

Rune

[ August 06, 2004, 08:08 AM: Message edited by: rune ]

[Redwolf]

I see, I see.

So what percentage of CAS missions ended up with partial or complete friendly fire?

The percentage of casualties is not very useful as it, like now in Iraq, punishes the military for managing to operate with low casualties overall.

And I repeat from earlier postings, few people have a problem with the overall probability of friendly fire in CM. But CM does not make a difference between situations with low risk of FF and high risk of FF, the probability of friendly fire is basically the same. Intermixed both side's tanks driving in all directions have the same probability as a quiet non-fighting force advancing toward the enemy. And the engine makes things worse by apparently highly raising the chance of FF when no enemies are visible.

[ August 06, 2004, 11:35 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]