Rokko Posted July 22, 2011 Share Posted July 22, 2011 Hi everyone, I saw that, in the editor, the German Panzer Bataillon in full strength contains a so called "Support Company". Since I head never heard of that before and had never heard that Panzer battalions had an integral recce force (the company contains to recon platoons, both armoured, one pioneer) I did some research. I came across a "Versorgungskompanie" in the official TOE, a term that rather translates to "Supply company". That definately doesn't sound like a fighting or recon unit. And supply units are not modelled in CMBN anyway. So I looked into Eric Lefèvre's "Panzers in Normandy" which has some nice visual tables of German Panzer Regiment organization. Interestingly, he also translates Versorgungskompanie to "Support company", but it contains, as the name implies, lots of supply trucks, medical stuff, maintenance etc. The units, that are in the CMBN Support company pretty closely match some of the units in the batallion staff company: It has signals and recon platoon (no signals in CMBN I guess), although that one has 8 tanks (PzIV or Panther) on its own, while CMBN one has none. It also has a Pioneer platoon which exactly matches the one from the "Support company" and an AA platoon, which is not in CMBN since there are no AA guns. Now I don't if maybe in the field things were different than in the TOE (well they probably were) or what the CMBN TOEs try to model exactly. Maybe 8 tanks were simply forgotten, again I don't know. But it seems that at least the Support company should be renamed, either to satisfy my geekiness or to avoid further confusion 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted July 22, 2011 Share Posted July 22, 2011 There were many, many revisions to the TO&E stretching from late 1943 until late 1944. Unfortunately, most books and research sources do a VERY poor job identifying which TO&E they are documenting. Very confusing. Many of the changes took place in the Battalion support units. We call it "Support Company" because, in English military terms, this is what it is. Therefore, to avoid confusion we didn't do a literal translation but instead used the established English term for that sort of formation. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rokko Posted July 22, 2011 Author Share Posted July 22, 2011 Ok, thanks for the reply! I should have known that BF takes that kind of stuff rather seriously 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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