Best books about the Battle for Normandy ?

[Magpie_Oz]

Will there ever be a time when a game engine can take a set of players orders and filter them, so that the end result depended on the various competencies of the different levels of command the original orders had to filter through.

I thought about something like this once before. I wonder if the ultimate form of the game will be us simply talking to a number of highly advanced AI's who represent our subordinates?

[YankeeDog]

True, most German units, by 44 were pale shadows, both in terms of numbers and capability, but if X unit had a historical reputation for good inter-arms cooperation and unit Y did not, surely X would have an advantage. I've heard quite a bit about CM rivaling traditional wargaming, but in some rule sets I've read there are advantages and penalties for this. CM quite rightly penalises poor quality troops, but gives them no penalties for infantry armour cooperation. IF CM ventures Eastward how will tanks racing ahead of their infantry support be modelled, sure it might take a little longer to get everyone singing from the same battleplan but eventually poor quality troops will be pulling off close coop with armour like pros.

One major way that troop quality affects Infantry-Armor coordination already is in the passing of spotting info. Take a platoon of say, regular tanks with normal command bonuses. First, team them up with a company of veteran infantry with good command bonuses and watch how quickly the tanks pick up spotting info based on what the infantry has seen. Then, take the same tank platoon and team them up with a Company of green infantry with command penalties in the same situation, and watch how much longer it takes the tanks to be aware of what the infantry has spotted. This can be very important in WWII settings, where the tanks aren't very good at spotting things themselves.

There are other things the game can do to simulate what poorly trained units can't do. IN CMSF, for example, most Syrian squads can't be split, simulating poorer training and more rigid tactical doctrine. I wouldn't be surprised if we see this again once CM returns to the early war Ost Front, with poorly trained Soviet units.

But ultimately, it is true that to completely realistically depict a unit with poor training, such as one with little to no experience with tank-infantry coordination, the player has to play badly. Regardless of you're pixeltruppen CO's "leadership rating" is, and what orders you can and can't execute with a certain unit, tactical skill and prowess is what you, the player, provides to the game.

I guess that if you want to really do this, you can just drink a 6-pack or something before playing, and then see how well you do.

[Cogust]

Here are the numbers from Zetterling (numbers are the initial strength):

Tiger II - 12 (all in s.Pz.Abt. 503)

Tiger I - 126

Panther - 625 or 626 with another 29 replacements sent during June and August

Panzer IV - 841 with another 45 Pz IV and 11 Pz.Bef.Wg IV sent between 6 July and 2 August

Panzer III - 30 (all Panzer III were not necessarily reported, as it was an obsolete tank, and that goes especially for the command version)

StuG III and StuH III - 453 with at least 27 but probably fewer than 100 sent as replacements

Sturmpanzer IV - between 16 and 28 (all with Stu.Pz.Abt 216)

Marder - a few infantry divisions had 14 each and 9.Pz.Div. had 9

Jagdpanzer IV - 41 with another 73 sent during June and July

Jagdpanther - 25 (all in s.Pz.Jg.Abtb654)

In addition to these tank there were quite a few captured tanks and home made assault guns (21. Pz.Div. anyone?) in Normandy.

[Narses]

You will have to find Zitterling's book if you want an answer, Buckley cites the book but doesn't give a detailed note explaining what you want answered. Buckley, citing Zitterling puts numbers at:

900 Mark IVs

650 Panthers

550 StuGs

120-30 Tigers (I and II)

300 "Others"

If you have Zitterling's Normandy book, look around pages 65-68.

Someone has already posted the numbers from Jentz which most importantly list the number of armored vehicles as of 10 June 1944.

I have Zetterling as well but be careful as his numbers also often include reinforcements sent the following month and makes assumptions about deliveries. But this is an outstanding book, no doubt as his book on Kursk. So those numbers on-hand in Zetterling would not include losses for example he says by 27 July (pg 82) the losses were: 224 Pz Iv's, 131 Panthers, 23 Tigers, 60 Stugs and 40 SP mounted PAK's ( Marders probably). Additionally about this same date there were 353 panzers and 117 assault guns in workshops. Zetterling can be a bit difficult to follow and he admits (pg 82) its difficult to come to exact numbers because of maintenance and deliveries and where the panzers were sent for repairs.

[Michael Emrys]

Not so much the Regimental system itself but rather the habit of swapping units about to form battle groups so that often a particular infantry unit may not have worked with a particular armoured brigade so they were not as cohesive.

This was a problem for the US as well. Which is why in practice the composition of combat commands tended to become permanent even though the theory was that units would be pulled out of a common pool to form task-specific groupings.

Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to have been much of a problem for the Heer, who did it all the time. This may have been the result of greater emphasis on uniformity of doctrine and training, so that the units involved knew what to expect of each other.

Michael

[wokelly]

However, I have read the same thing in a variety of sources, mostly written before his book. So whether entirely correct or not, he wasn't just pulling that out of thin air.

Michael

Not so much the Regimental system itself but rather the habit of swapping units about to form battle groups so that often a particular infantry unit may not have worked with a particular armoured brigade so they were not as cohesive.

That tended to extend from units not necessarily being assigned to a specific division.

Buckley notes that units that had trained together in previously tended to perform better.

Magpie Oz has pretty much touched on the issue. While the Regimental system may have caused problems, its a very simplistic explanation. More modern scholarly studies on the British Army (which Buckley collects and combines in his book) have shown the issues to be far more complex than simple 'Allied tanks were poorly designed' and 'the regimental system prevented infantry-tank cooperation.' Hastings and other 80's revisionists did not have access to these recent studies so I don't fault them for falling back on the only explanations that would have been around for Allied failings. However in the post-revisionist period (late 90s to present) a lot more detailed works have emerged which explain things much better than those 80's works could have. Hastings and others did not really touch on doctrine or training, issues of how the war office structured Armoured Divisions and Amroured Brigades, Montgomery's personal views on the role of the tank and of Armoured Divisions/Brigades, and his own firepower doctrine he brought to 21st Army group.

I did a fourth year University historiography paper on 21st Army Group Armoured Formations, so I read a lot of the stuff written over the past 30 years.

Someone has already posted the numbers from Jentz which most importantly list the number of armored vehicles as of 10 June 1944.

I agree an overall picture of campaign totals does not perfectly translate into showing the reader what the Allies faced on the average day, but it does show that many more German tanks were not Panthers and Tigers than were. Buckley's book is a synthesis of previous works, and is aimed at a more broad base of readers than the studies he synthesizes (I have read those books he relies on, they are pretty dry reads). Many of these people are likely to think the Germans had millions of Tigers and Panthers, so that comment is there to show that in fact there were fewer panthers, and even less tigers, compared to other types.

I don't think for most people here the "Tank Gap" chapter will be all that surprising and we may in fact have issues with certain points. The book has about eight other chapters focusing on doctrine, training, command, morale and so on, stuff I doubt many of us really know that much about. Primarily for those chapters I recommend the book, it is a very good first read for those who do not know much about conflicts between montgomery and the war office about doctrine, how Monty's views combined with units structured on the war office's TO&Es and designed for different purposes led to complications in Normandy, how and why british tanks developed as they did and so on.

If you like that stuff on doctrine and training, purchase two of the scholarly works Buckley uses a lot:

Place, Timothy. Military Training in the British Army, 1940-1944. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000.

Hart, Stephen. Colossal Crack: Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in North West Europe, 1944-1945. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2000.

[Blackcat]

I thought about something like this once before. I wonder if the ultimate form of the game will be us simply talking to a number of highly advanced AI's who represent our subordinates?

That would be a super game to play. Imagine playing such a game, "Fred take your company and take that hill there. George, I want your company to probe towards the village, once Fred has the hill switch from probe to assualt, you'll have a platoon of Shermans available to you in about thirty minutes. Harry you hold in reserve ready to either pass through George's troops once they have taken the village or to give him a hand if he gets stuck. Battalion mortars are available to all three companies, but ammo is limited so don't get greedy." That would be that; then you could go off down to the pub and come back later to find out how your game went. It would be sure to be a best seller.

[RockinHarry]

There were various levels of bad tank / infantry coordination. Late war german tank unit commanders (also incl. independent Army Stug-, or Tiger units) oftenly complained, when subordinated to infantry unit commanders, these would "plan" and execute actions by particular demands of the infantry. This led to situations, where the tank units where sent into terrain, that wasn´t suited for tank movements (marshy, muddy terrain, generally confined ect.). Or supply and maintenance issues were completely neglected, as the infantry commanders didn´t feel any responsibility for it. Also pre battle recconnaissance did not fit the needs for tank units (terrain, mines?, enemy AT?), or infantry unit commanders completely failed to put the tank commander into the given situation, sending the tank unit into attack just when it arrived.

On small scale coordination, inexperienced infantry tended to either bunch up behind armor, when on the move, or to the contrary, let the tanks move alone, in "confidence", the tanks might break the opposition all alone. This also led to situations, that infantry did not watch out for enemy AT guns or infantry AT teams, with the result that the tanks slammed straight into ambushes. The basic rule during tank / infantry coordination was that infantry protects tanks from hidden enemy AT (excl. armor) and tanks fight enemy targets dangerous to the infantry (HMG ect.).

All of that is either in hands of the player, or scenario designer in CMBN.

[Narses]

There were various levels of bad tank / infantry coordination. Late war german tank unit commanders (also incl. independent Army Stug-, or Tiger units) oftenly complained, when subordinated to infantry unit commanders, these would "plan" and execute actions by particular demands of the infantry. This led to situations, where the tank units where sent into terrain, that wasn´t suited for tank movements (marshy, muddy terrain, generally confined ect.). Or supply and maintenance issues were completely neglected, as the infantry commanders didn´t feel any responsibility for it. Also pre battle recconnaissance did not fit the needs for tank units (terrain, mines?, enemy AT?), or infantry unit commanders completely failed to put the tank commander into the given situation, sending the tank unit into attack just when it arrived.

On small scale coordination, inexperienced infantry tended to either bunch up behind armor, when on the move, or to the contrary, let the tanks move alone, in "confidence", the tanks might break the opposition all alone. This also led to situations, that infantry did not watch out for enemy AT guns or infantry AT teams, with the result that the tanks slammed straight into ambushes. The basic rule during tank / infantry coordination was that infantry protects tanks from hidden enemy AT (excl. armor) and tanks fight enemy targets dangerous to the infantry (HMG ect.).

All of that is either in hands of the player, or scenario designer in CMBN.

Hmm, where do I know you from with that moniker? Was it Panzer Elite ? I was on the mod team for Ostpak ( EF version of Pz Elite). I was Hetzer on Pz Elite. Boy, that was back around 2000-2005 and there has never been another plt level tank game where you could enter and if necessary move to another pz in your zug as good and I've tried T34vTiger and Steel Fury.

You touched on an interesting subject about poor use of armor. Recall the Panthers at Kursk stumbling around in poor terrain filled with mines although that was based on a screwy command setup as I recall and a Pz Bde cdr (for all the Panthers & attached to GD) that was very inexperienced on the East Front and he got in a hell of a row with GD's cdr of their Pz Rgt who was Graf Strachwitz the so-called "Pz Baron."

[daft]

For those of you with Kindles or Kindle apps, check out "No Better Place to Die". It's about the 82:nd AB and the small unit actions fought around St Mere Eglise, especially at the La Fière bridge and causeway.

Best of all it is free om Amazon.com!

Get it here!

[Pete Wenman]

For those of you with Kindles or Kindle apps, check out "No Better Place to Die".

Thanks for the head up

P

[Charlie Marlow]

This was a problem for the US as well. Which is why in practice the composition of combat commands tended to become permanent even though the theory was that units would be pulled out of a common pool to form task-specific groupings.

Michael

From what I have read, this wasn't the practice in the US 4th Armored Division (at least according to Gabel in his paper on the 4th at Nancy). There were no fixed battalions in the combat commands. This does not seem to have adversely effected 4th AD's performance.

[RockinHarry]

Hmm, where do I know you from with that moniker? Was it Panzer Elite ? I was on the mod team for Ostpak ( EF version of Pz Elite). I was Hetzer on Pz Elite. Boy, that was back around 2000-2005 and there has never been another plt level tank game where you could enter and if necessary move to another pz in your zug as good and I've tried T34vTiger and Steel Fury.

You touched on an interesting subject about poor use of armor. Recall the Panthers at Kursk stumbling around in poor terrain filled with mines although that was based on a screwy command setup as I recall and a Pz Bde cdr (for all the Panthers & attached to GD) that was very inexperienced on the East Front and he got in a hell of a row with GD's cdr of their Pz Rgt who was Graf Strachwitz the so-called "Pz Baron."

Yep, RockinHarry, Panzer Elite Brit44/B41 and PEDG with Aldo in the lead during last years of my participation, which I had to stop for various reasons. This is a couple of years gone now. And yes, I recall your nick from the forums.

Panzer Elite has some really good features (obsolete graphics engine left aside), but under given circumstances almost impossible to bring on current standards. SFK 1942 and T34vTiger are quite good simulations with gorgeous graphics. Too bad, I lack time to actually play them or make maps/scenarios.

[Michael Emrys]

From what I have read, this wasn't the practice in the US 4th Armored Division (at least according to Gabel in his paper on the 4th at Nancy). There were no fixed battalions in the combat commands. This does not seem to have adversely effected 4th AD's performance.

The 4th. was one of the best performing armored divisions in the Army. Probably by the time it got to Nancy everybody had cross attached with everybody else enough times that they all knew the game plan and leader personalities pretty well. That was the thing that other divisions seem to have had varying degrees of difficulty with.

Michael

[GerryCMBB]

Hello:

Just read my first Normandy book, "Normandy by Olivier Wieviorka". A lot about the politics before, logistics and strategies, psychological effects on soldiers and how they were treated, De Gaulle, and crimes committed by both sides. Not so much on the operations themselves but maybe OK as a first book to set the table.

Anyone read it?

Now need to look at the thread again to see what I should read next.

Gerry

[GerryCMBB]

Just reading Operation Cobra by Zaloga and came across this:

"Over the next several days, the fighting around Mortain shifted to small unit actions, with GIs and panzer grenadiers bitterly contesting hedges, ruined farms, and road junctions".

Just like CMBN!

Gerry

[sburke]

Just reading Operation Cobra by Zaloga and came across this:

"Over the next several days, the fighting around Mortain shifted to small unit actions, with GIs and panzer grenadiers bitterly contesting hedges, ruined farms, and road junctions".

Just like CMBN!

Gerry

Am reading Normandiefront right now. Am still on the portion on D Day itself. Apparently at one point some ost front troops at Omaha revolted against the germans in their bunker and refused to have the position fire. A team leader tried to call the bunker after hearing about it and they wouldn't answer so he went and fragged the bunker himself, then was killed while returning to his position. And to think I joked about fragging a bunker that was exhibiting bug issues recently...hmmmm

[sburke]

More reading - just got an update that my copy of Lions of Carentan is shipping!

http://www.amazon.com/LIONS-CARENTAN-Fallschirmjager-Regiment-1943-1945/dp/1612000061

So when is that next module coming out?

[sburke]

Lions of Carentan just arrived and I couldn't wait to see what kind of details it would have on that specific battle.... well suffice it to say if you are looking to work on a scenario for CMBN, this isn't likely to be a source you will need. It may be a general interest book on the overall history of the 6th FJR, but has very little if anything to really help putting together a scenario.

There are a few nice pics, no decent maps other than the most general. Interesting attitudes towards the Waffen SS (more specifically the 17th SS)- basically disdain other than having them as a possible source of replacements. It seems Van Der Heydte kind of commandeered a few at one point.

I'll read it, but not so sure this one will stay on the shelf for future reference.

[The Teacher]

The 12 ss volume one and volume two by Hubert Meyer-Stackpole books

Great detail of battles from the German side.

Utah beach by Balkoski - Stackpole books.

Great detail and easy to read.

I find most of the Stackpole Military books are very good.

[sburke]

I can recommend for division and lower Normandy combat & actions:

1) Normandy Front (D-Day from the German 352 Inf Div) by Vince Milano

*snip*

Just finished this and totally agree. This is one of the best books I have read from the German side and was a far better read than Lions of Carentan. By the end you are almost seething at the pitiful treatment of this division by the German high command as it literally bleeds to death trying to hold together the front. Time and again it is told reinforcements are on the way, always too little too late. Great read, lots of information of what the battle was like for the landser in the front lines.

[Canada Guy]

I just finished reading

No Holding Back: Operation Totalize, Normandy, August 1944 (Stackpole Books)

Interesting book and gives a good view of Simonds, Crerar and some of the lower ranks (Booth and his drunkenness).

Canadians were green, yes and were relying upon Harris and the use of strategic bombers to open some of the roads for him which did not work but some of the actions (Quesnay Wood) were very well executed. It was also the first use of an armoured APC (Kangaroo) and at the time, the operation was considered a success.

It is only in later years that there has been some 2nd guessing about the ability to take Falaise. It was not part of the initial plan and what they achieved was good.

If they had initiated the operation on the day they had wanted to and had scheduled, instead of pushing it up a day at Monty's instance, it may have been even more successful.

I think this could be a great campaign to model in CMBN in the next module. It has everything that the new module will have. Canadians, SS and Brits.