CM:Normandy Will we finally (after b(n)agging for more than a decennia) get them?

[Jaws]

The Horse Drawn troops?

I loved those discussions in the past and still am curious if BF managed to fix this.

[patboy]

I do not see the interest in 1944, the German army was motorized!

Pat

[Blackcat]

When I saw the title of thsi thread I was sure you were talking about tripod mounts for bren guns!

[Jaws]

I do not see the interest in 1944, the German army was motorized!

Pat

Check this about horses in Normandy. ( Falaise pocket corridor of death)

[Cuirassier]

The German army was far from motorized. Nevertheless, horses have little place in a CM battlefield. They were used to move supplies and guns around far behind the front lines.

[John Kettler]

Jaws,

Most of the Heer was horse drawn, and horses, not to mention mules and donkeys, served all during the War, in all kinds of theaters, but I seriously doubt we'll see them. BFC's position has long been that they're irrelevant, since they're not involved in actual combat. Someone, of course, forgot to tell the Germans in Falaise, the SS Division Florian Geyer, the Russian cavalry divisions, etc. It would be a huge amount of work to do all the animations, code the horse behaviors and so forth, but if doable, I think it would greatly improve the fidelity of the game and would permit all manner of new possibilities. Retreat, for example, becomes much more exciting when limited by tired, hungry horses!

I close with this account by a Russian cavalryman. Be sure to hit the translate button on each page if once doesn't cut it.

http://www.iremember.ru/content/view/1038/89/1/0/lang,ru/

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

patboy,

The leg units weren't, and that was most of the Heer. Horse drawn carts moved HMGs, mortars, ammo and supplies. Horse drawn wagons supplied the divisions and moved guns as big as the 15 cm sFH 18. There's even color gun camera footage of such transport being strafed by U.S. fighters.

This Wiki will give you a good idea of how poorly motorized the Heer really was. Recommend you start with the Barbarossa breakdown under "Infantry Divisions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_divisions_in_World_War_II

Regards,

John Kettler

[costard]

I seem to remember that when Rommel asked for 200 lorries for the North Africa campaign, Hitler said something like "Sure - but I'll have to strip the eastern front to get them."

Another snippet concerns the relative mechanical aptitude of the US vs German soldiers - the Yank peasantry (farming boys gone to war) used tractors and motorcars far more frequently than the German and had more experience maintaining them, so the vehicles remained in service longer without having to go to depots for maintenance.

The Germans in western Europe were somewhat envious of the amount of materiel available to the Allies - "fighting a rich man's war".

Imagine trying to mount an amphibious operation with horses? You'd be better off dropping them out of heavy bombers and hoping some would learn to fly on the way down.

[MeatEtr]

I do not see the interest in 1944, the German army was motorized!

Pat

That's a classic misconception of the German Army in WWII.

[Sergei]

I think Pat is just being sarcastic... which is easy to miss, French humour being slightly less understandable than German humour (which is very easy to understand - "Vee stomp on your face with our jackboots now, zat is komische! Ha ha ha!")

Horses - unless specially trained like in cavalry - would simply be too unreliable when under fire to be used in dire spots in the frontline. So while there would be some quite good reasons for their inclusion - like Soviet partisans ambushing a wagon convoy - in the end the workload required to model their behaviour and animations and everything is not very easily justified by the rather limited gains from this. That has been the reason for the last 10 years, anyway.

Of course there was an attempt to model horses for CMBB, and Madmatt was sent to buy some TNT and horses to do some preliminary studies on their behaviour, but unfortunately PETA found out before the field tests were conducted.

[TheVulture]

Forget horses. What combat mission absolutely needs is Soviet propellor-driven ski-cars!

You can see them driving around in the World at War Stalingrad episode (see

starting at 4:09 for about 10 seconds)

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I seem to remember that when Rommel asked for 200 lorries for the North Africa campaign, Hitler said something like "Sure - but I'll have to strip the eastern front to get them."

Another snippet concerns the relative mechanical aptitude of the US vs German soldiers - the Yank peasantry (farming boys gone to war) used tractors and motorcars far more frequently than the German and had more experience maintaining them, so the vehicles remained in service longer without having to go to depots for maintenance.

The Germans in western Europe were somewhat envious of the amount of materiel available to the Allies - "fighting a rich man's war".

Imagine trying to mount an amphibious operation with horses? You'd be better off dropping them out of heavy bombers and hoping some would learn to fly on the way down.

Horses run on a more readily available fuel then lorries. The Germans weren't just being old fashioned, it was actually rather clever of them.

[Michael Emrys]

Horses run on a more readily available fuel then lorries.

Depends on where you are. Not much green fodder in the Libyan desert. And since fuel of any sort had to be shipped in, you should note that a formation of any given size would use more fodder, measured in tons, than gasoline or diesel.

Michael

[c3k]

Hmmm, but when you're surrounded and out of supply, just try to EAT your truck. Now let's see which army is smarter...

Ken

[Elmar Bijlsma]

But Germany had a serious problem with their POL reservesbefore the war, eventually unable to meet the needs of the armed forces mid war even with synthetic fuel production. Imagine how much worse it would've been if they'd been fully mechanized.

Also, foraging for something for the horses to eat was probably more rewarding then doing the same for fuel. Even in Libya.

[YankeeDog]

Horses run on a more readily available fuel then lorries. The Germans weren't just being old fashioned, it was actually rather clever of them.

My suspect you're being a bit tongue-and-cheek, but almost any decent-sized army relying on animal transport eats through the locally available fodder within a pretty short time of arriving in a given location. This was actually of of the primary limiters on the size of armies and the length of time they could stay in the field until the invention of the railroad and, later, the internal combustion engine.

And as noted, relying on horseflesh also limits where you can go to terrain that will support them. It makes you much more vulnerable to tactics such as a scorched earth campaign. Another problem with horses is that they require large amounts of fodder and water, even when they're not needed and are doing no work. Fodder is also more difficult to store for extended period of time than petrol or diesel -- it rots if not kept properly. So it's logistically far more difficult to keep a horseflesh army in the field for an extended period than it is a motorized one.

Yes, due to the loss access to oil fields and refineries especially towards the end of the war meant that the Germans were having a hard time getting enough fuel just to supply their combat vehicles, let alone their transport trucks. But overall, I think they would have gladly traded some of their horses for more Opel trucks...

As far as the original topic, I suspect the original request was mostly tongue-and-cheek as well, but horses are somewhere WAY down my list of desirable features for CMx2:WWII. I mean sure, they were there. And inevitably, I'm sure in some places horses got caught close enough to the front lines to be part of engagements. I'd bet my house that they played a measurable role in less than 1% of engagements at the CM scale. Even if they were relatively easy to get in (which they're certainly not), I'd rather see the work go into a couple hundred other features before horses. Motorcycles, Bren tripods, those bicycles some Commonwealth troops carried ashore with them at Normandy... I think all of these are more relevant to CM than horses. And we're probably not going to see these things in CM:N, either.

In a higher-level WWII game, such as a Brigade or Divisional-level combat simulator of Normandy, modeling the use of horse transport by the Germans would be much more important. At the CM level, this stuff is best represented in scenario and campaign design (poorer supply, artillery availability, etc.).

Cheers,

YD

[Sequoia]

First, those bloody horses They require a ton of modeling/animation details, but also need entirely unique TacAI since they are in a sense both vehicles and soldiers, not one or the other like we have now.

Steve

A note from Steve about doing horses.

[Battlefront.com]

Yup, we will never likely have horses for practical reasons. Sure, if they were easy to throw into the game we'd have them to better simulate rear line units and the EXTREMELY rare use of them as cavalry in frontline situations (most were used as operational scouts or anti-partisan ops) we'd certainly put them in. But the truth is I think it would be easier to make 32 seat multi-player twice over than to get horses in and working correctly.

Again, the return on investment is massively small compared to the investment itself. Since players can only experience what we invest in, it's in nobody's interest to have horses in a WW2 game. Now, if we ever do an 19th century or earlier wargame... then horses are mandatory. Er... which is the primary reason we have no pre WW2 games slated for development

Steve

[lomir]

Am I late?

[Michael Emrys]

...massively small...

"Massively small"???

Okay. I know that we are allowed considerable latitude in the use of language on the net and this forum, but this must set some kind of record.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

This thread as a whole:

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

Michael Emrys

Once again, Steve, I'm getting this feeling that you're wrong about your own games

I like complimentary juxtapositions

Back to the fodder thing for a sec. It's true that any military force, of any size, will strip the land clean of food within a very short space of time proportional to the space occupied. The longer it stays, the more of a problem this creates. Which means having horses for transport did no favors to the Germans in terms of local sustainability.

What it did do was offer strategic sustainability because of limited industrial capacity and, most importantly, difficulty in providing substantial quantities of petroleum based products (not just fuel). Remember, the German industrial output was still on a peacetime footing until sometime in 1943, as completely baffling as that may sound! Getting horses into the field and keeping them fed (fueled) was more economical and practical given Germany's overall strategic constraints (which included supreme idiocy). If Germany had better industrial and petroleum opportunities, along with better management of the economy, motorized transport would have been the norm instead of horses, foot, and bicycles.

Steve

[Sergei]

This thread as a whole:

Michael

But to be fair, dead horses were a very common view on European battlefields.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Were they getting flogged at the time?

Regards

KR

[Sergei]

If you wanted tender meat, yes.