WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?

[hoolaman]

The light mortar is basically the same flimsy tube firing dumb bombs now as it was back then. Wikipedia even tells me the modern US 60mm mortar can still fire WW2 model bombs.

I don't think it is right to be too dismissive of 1940s technology and methods as being orders of magnitude less effective than modern.

There are analogue versions of most modern technology that an experienced user can get good performance out of. Where now there are computers and lasers, before there would be paper tables, optical rangefinders and good old fashioned gut feel.

I work in the oil industry where a lot of the standard processes are exactly the same as they were in the fifties. Now there are computerized centralized systems, but functionally it is the same as going out and looking at an analogue gauge, checking a guide table and turning a valve by hand.

[sburke]

SBurke, I am now going to drive you, perhaps, nuts

Sadly you are a wee bit late, I passed that line years ago.

--and I have sympathy for you, but here it goes: The WW2 books are not a random data stream. People tend to write about what is unusual or atypical. Your rejoinder may be, "But what else should be go by?"

The point of Clay Pigeons is, he wasn't writing about what was atypical, but rather over the course of a month in the struggle to take St Lo, what was common. If I was just serving up general anecdotal info I would say you are right on the money, but I would posit it isn't just another anecdotal reference.

To argue with an expert who has 7,000 + posts, and clearly has a very extensive knowledge of WW2 source material may seem foolish, but I am willing to be the fool if it gets me/us the East Front simulation we want. I will admit that the US and Germans in Normandy in 1944 are likely the closest progenitors to current warfare. But I will argue that WW2 was not, mostly, a Modern War. Breed CMSF with CMBB, but keep Blitzkieg (I think that was the name on the original CMBB disc for the first campaign), Blitkrieg in how it plays. Unless you can show that that original simulation was grievously in error.

Well that certainly isn't me LOL I'll leave JonS to be the knowledgeable respondent, but for me it does feel right. Brutal yes but when I compare my experience with CMBN to what AARs I have read and casualty reports, it seems that BFC certainly got something right about it. When I have to adapt my tactics around mortars and Mgs and trying to figure out how to cross an apparently empty field not knowing what is on the other side, I think to some small minute degree I begin to understand what the average grunt felt like in Normandy. In achieving that I am really impressed with the game in a way I didn't quite expect when I bought it.

That doesn't take away from the items folks are trying to figure out if they are modelled correctly and the ones that seem not to work and I fully appreciate and support folks like yourself pushing if they feel something is off. At the least it provokes discussion and sharing of information. I think we all come away from this with either the urge to look for information, new insights or just the pleasure of talking it out. I also wouldn't assume the East Front will play out the same way as Normandy does even without tweaking the engine. I think the actual biggest challenge will be the C2 aspect for the Eastern front. Is Morale or experience going to be the only determinants? How does relative spotting work when the Germans have radios in tanks and the Russians do not.

[JonS]

JonS: I vote for "accurate not precise" as the standard pattern.

I agree. I've tested this quite a bit, too, and 'accurate not precise' is what we've got.

The basic format I used to test is a grid of roads, using the + piece intelocking, then aiming at the centre point with a point target from a 105mm battery. There is a quite surprisingly large dispersion (imprecision) around the point of aim, although the MPI is correctly (accurately) centred on the point of aim.

It took me a while to get my head around, but what I eventually realised is that my perception of distances within the game isn't very good. It appears that the imprecision around the point of aim is quite small, but when you measure it (using the LOS tool) it's actually quite large. i think what makes it appear to be too small it that as a player you're hovering up in the sky, and able to take in the whole battlefield at a glance. It's that - I think - which makes the dispersion look too small, when it really isn't.

[winkelried]

I don't think it is right to be too dismissive of 1940s technology and methods as being orders of magnitude less effective than modern.

I fully agree. What we understand as "modern" big (I don't talk about small wars) warfare (as modelled in CMSF) actually is a product of the technological development since the early 1980s - weapons which were then deployed en-masse towards the end of this decade (laser, GPS, computers, precision ammunition just to name a few). Also doctrine for this kind of warfare was only developed after the fall of the Warszaw Pact. Doctrine up to 1989 was a logical development of the experience of WW2. Only operational-tactical nuclear weapons were an post-WW2 addition.

A lot of the tactics and the technology we had by then, was a logical development which had its roots in the 1940's - and some of the equipment hadn't changed since then (e.g. 81mm, 120mm mortars, 105mm, 155mm artillery, MGs).

The main driver in development of "modern" warfare today is that public opinion is far more important in the kind of open societies we now live in, to how a war is fought. In the past it seems, that Clausewitz' trinity (armed forces, government, people) was pretty easy to manage despite the high losses (it wasn't - look at the war-bond rising campaigns in the US) and that today the decisive factor is public opinion on how many losses a society is willing to sustain in a war fought.

[winkelried]

It took me a while to get my head around, but what I eventually realised is that my perception of distances within the game isn't very good. It appears that the imprecision around the point of aim is quite small, but when you measure it (using the LOS tool) it's actually quite large. i think what makes it appear to be too small it that as a player you're hovering up in the sky, and able to take in the whole battlefield at a glance. It's that - I think - which makes the dispersion look too small, when it really isn't.

I agree. I just tested the 15cm Nebelwerfer and was positively surprised by the dispersion. I fired a full set of ordnance at a single point. The first impression I had was that the fire was ways too precise, but then I measured it with the LOS tool and I got figures which are in the range of the documented CEP for this weapon.

[winkelried]

The FO is 100s of yards away, with a walkie-talkie the size of a shoe box. Out of visual contact, he only vaguely knows where the mortar team is--sort of back and behind him, according to his hand drawn map, if there had actually been some planning before hand. There is smoke and mist.

With binoculars, he sees a target....several hundred yards ahead, he guesses.

Query: With what accuracy is that FO going to call in the spotting round, even assuming good visibility to the target? [if I were him, I would err on going long, and we he and the mortar are using compasses to set direction? True? Can you imagine how that works if the FO and mortar are not in the same line as the target?]

And each "thump" of the mortar is not changing its baseplate orientation of the mortar in the dirt?

When you read the field manuals for the employment of the 60mm mortar with the infantry company you will see two things:

• the mortar crews trained to fire indirect fire procedures like the artillery does. They had a reference point (a stick or so) and adjusted the weapon accordingly. This solved the baseplate issue too I assume. so they behaved just like "normal" artillery would do.
  
• there usually wasn't a FO but they deployed within voice distance to the company CO or a platoon CO so the interaction was pretty close.
  

[winkelried]

The FO is 100s of yards away, with a walkie-talkie the size of a shoe box. Out of visual contact, he only vaguely knows where the mortar team is--sort of back and behind him, according to his hand drawn map, if there had actually been some planning before hand. There is smoke and mist.

With binoculars, he sees a target....several hundred yards ahead, he guesses.

Query: With what accuracy is that FO going to call in the spotting round, even assuming good visibility to the target? [if I were him, I would err on going long, and we he and the mortar are using compasses to set direction? True? Can you imagine how that works if the FO and mortar are not in the same line as the target?]

this is the problem all indirect fire approaches have - you have to see the spotting rounds. that's why we trained this with real artillery pretty often - and more than once - in training or mission - we either couldn't see the initial round (maybe just hear it) or we got such a round a bit too close for comfort. BTW this is a process CMx2 models pretty well.

[winkelried]

When I look at this discussion, I think we have maybe an issue in understanding U.S. doctrine for the WW2 infantry company. IMHO:

Although the U.S. screwed up with the doctrine for the machine gun (the B.A.R. can't really compete with the MG34/42) they understood that the firepower of the rifles alone and the few MGs wouldn't make it. So they gave the infantry company organic artillery in the form of the 60mm mortar. In addition this mortar was pretty well designed (whereas the Germans screwed up with their 50mm mortars).

[Michael Emrys]

...(whereas the Germans screwed up with their 50mm mortars).

I'd be interested to hear your reasons for that. Not that I am in disagreement, I'd just like to pick your brains. Since the Germans withdrew the 50mm from service in favor of more 81mm mortars, plainly they were not entirely happy with it either. But I've always assumed that the reasons lay less with any failure of the 50mm than an urgent desire to get more firepower generated in combat. The only real criticism I can think of for the 50mm is that was a fairly heavy and cumbersome piece of equipment to lug around for a relatively small bomb. The British 2" was more portable and the US 60mm more powerful, so they were a bit more useful and I suppose that's why they were retained when the 50mm was not. But you sound like you believe there was more to it than that.

Michael

[winkelried]

But you sound like you believe there was more to it than that.

Not really. That they retired it in favour of more of the 81mm and introduced a copy of the soviet 120mm mortar on higher level says enough. The reasons for failure are the ones you mention: not enough firepower for the effort.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

my only issue is with the effects caused by light mortars, especially what comes to infantry in foxholes.

causing losses should be rare, requiring direct hits. light mortar grenades are of handgrenade class. their main effect is causing suppression and with close hits taking an individual soldier temporarily out of action (for a couple of minutes, not hours or days). light mortars are harassing weapons.

German 50mm mortar grenade has 0.28 lbs TNT. US 60mm has 0.34 lbs. 20% difference. a small or a big difference? well, a German mk.24 hand grenade has 0.36 lbs.

81mm mortar has 3.5 times the TNT, but it's still not the kind of killer against men in foxholes as the light mortars are in the game.

120mm has 5 times the TNT the 81mm has and is the first weapon which should have anywhere near the effects caused by lights mortars in the game.

historically causing the effects seen in the game, you should probably go for the 155mm HE, which has 44.5 times the TNT the 60mm has (15.13 lbs).

[winkelried]

light mortar grenades are of handgrenade class. their main effect is causing suppression and with close hits taking an individual soldier temporarily out of action (for a couple of minutes, not hours or days).

Not quite correct. The main effect mortar has, is shrapnel - concussion is a secondary effect IMHO. Even for handgrenades there are two different types - with and without shrapnel. Today some armies even use handgrenades where the major effect is shrapnel (or small bullets) as the only type of handgrenades.

so the effect does not mainly depend on the amount of TNT they carry, but on the number of shrapnels they "produce" and how far they project them to be lethal. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread the M49A2 (HE for M2 60mm mortar) produces 200 shell fragments with an effective radius of 15m.

[ArgusEye]

So far I haven't found the Heer documents about the retirement of the 5 cm mortars, but there were research projects in 1945, trying to find some use for the warehouses full of 5 cm bombs that were not used by the front. There are some off-hand remarks in there. Conversion to anti-air weapons was considered the most promising use, but it was never executed.

The 5cm's were retired by OKH after the front soldiers began to refuse to take them along, something rare in the German army of the time. These were the perennially underequipped guys who would take anything for more firepower. The complaint was that the 'Effect' (Auswirkung) of the bombs was less than if the mortar team were equipped with rifles.

5cm's were designed for semi-trench situations, in which you wanted to grenade an enemy position, which was out of reach. The expensive aiming equipment was meant to give the best pinpoint precision you could get given the nature of the weapon, and to increase precision it had very little range. This made for a weapon that was unimpressive at rifle ranges, and useless beyond.

To say that they dropped the 5cm to get more 8,1cm is a bit odd. The 5cm was literally left behind, not traded in. If desired, one could get all the usual 8,1cm and retain the 5cm. But only a few second rate outfits did so.

If you read the American lessons learned documents, the 60mm mortar is not so much loved for its effectiveness as it is for the fact that the platoon can get one right up to the firing line, as opposed to the 81's which have to be called for.

[Bruce Robert]

Brief anecdotal point on rockets:

My uncle was on a 105 mobile artillery unit. He said that when rockets came in they could quickly tell whether they needed to move quickly, or were safe where they were. He seemed to indicate that rocket attacks did not cause the concern other type of weapons did. Of course, he was speaking in relative terms, as any explosion going off near you was cause for grave concern. But rockets were, from his experience, relatively inaccurate.

Second point:

possibly some useful information here. If this has already been mentioned/discussed, my apologizes.

http://nigelef.tripod.com/wt_of_fire.htm

This site discusses the British artillery study that was done during WWII. Based upon Nigel Evans, artillery was not as effective/deadly as it appears to be in CMBN. I say seems, not is, as I do not have the background training to make a qualified assessment.

Bruce G.

[Chek]

As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread the M49A2 (HE for M2 60mm mortar) produces 200 shell fragments with an effective radius of 15m.

And that's just one.

A dozen or so would be a terrifying experience.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Not quite correct. The main effect mortar has, is shrapnel - concussion is a secondary effect IMHO. Even for handgrenades there are two different types - with and without shrapnel. Today some armies even use handgrenades where the major effect is shrapnel (or small bullets) as the only type of handgrenades.

so the effect does not mainly depend on the amount of TNT they carry, but on the number of shrapnels they "produce" and how far they project them to be lethal. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread the M49A2 (HE for M2 60mm mortar) produces 200 shell fragments with an effective radius of 15m.

assuming there's no treeburst or similar, the effective radius is about 0.5 meters - a direct hit on the foxhole. other than that it's just suppression - forcing the guys take cover.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

The 5cm's were retired by OKH after the front soldiers began to refuse to take them along, something rare in the German army of the time. These were the perennially underequipped guys who would take anything for more firepower. The complaint was that the 'Effect' (Auswirkung) of the bombs was less than if the mortar team were equipped with rifles.

5cm's were designed for semi-trench situations, in which you wanted to grenade an enemy position, which was out of reach. The expensive aiming equipment was meant to give the best pinpoint precision you could get given the nature of the weapon, and to increase precision it had very little range. This made for a weapon that was unimpressive at rifle ranges, and useless beyond.

fwiw this was the Finnish experience as well. they were considered totally worthless. in practice they were used only in static trench conditions, where the high angle effect could be utilized to annoy the enemy.

[Jammersix]

assuming there's no treeburst or similar, the effective radius is about 0.5 meters - a direct hit on the foxhole. other than that it's just suppression - forcing the guys take cover.

This is pretty amusing.

A half meter is about 20 inches.

Your statement means that someone one yard away is at more than 150% of effective range.

I suspect you misplaced at least one decimal point.

This type of statement is easy to make on the internet. So is the mistake.

It would be considerably harder to make five meters (more than TEN TIMES your claimed effective range) from an exploding light mortar round.

[ArgusEye]

The small mortars would have very little effect on dug-in troops if the bomb falls outside their hole. That much is true. As harassing fire they would be used on exposed men, and would be approximately similar to hand grenading them.

I came across an interesting study made just after WWI, titled Some biological effects due to high explosives, written by a British captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who tries to tie in suppression effects with shell shock and blows up some animals to show that many suppression effects correlate with physiological damage due to blast. He makes a good case for a strong suppressive effect -"dazing" if you will- from the sharp blastwave rolling over the foxhole alone. This effect goes up significantly with caliber.

Not all suppression is fear of splinters.

[Jammersix]

The small mortars would have very little effect on dug-in troops if the bomb falls outside their hole. That much is true.

Perhaps. Do you have a citation for it, or is it merely an opinion?

[ArgusEye]

I should think it is rather well-accepted. Is there any particular aspect you wish to hear about? Otherwise, I could refer to the very fact that VT fusing artillery shells was found profitable, I could refer to the small charges in the mortar bombs being unlikely to cave in shelters or trenches, I could refer to the geometry of small fragments starting from the ground having to curve steeply to enter a pit - but these are not citations.

If you wish a citation, you could do worse than "A THEORETICAL DETERMINATION OF THE BEST HEIGHT OF BURST FOR V.T. FUZED MORTAR BOMBS" from the Byfleet Army Operational Research establishment.

[LongLeftFlank]

While it's indeed a trivial matter for a trained WWII mortarman (and observer) to "drop a pickle in a bucket at 500m", thus allowing a light mortar to kill infantry in open holes given enough time and ammo, that assumes they know where the bucket is (i.e. the observer has the target under direct observation, relatively free of obstruction).

In those cases, the target has only 3 alternatives:

(a) kill the shooters / FOs,

( withdraw to less readily observed terrain

© dig in deeper and roof over the dugouts so that only heavy shell direct hits will kill them and the mortars cause only pinning and shock.

In hilly areas, that kind of direct observation could happen more often, and explains the particular horror of the Hurtgenwald (sitting in the bottom of a valley filled with scraggly pines, surrounded on 3 sides by enemy FOs), or numerous valleys in Italy (which is also more sparsely vegetated). In not-quite-so-radically-hilly Normandy, this also explains much of the importance ascribed to seizing / holding the various heights around Saint Lo and Caen. It also explains much of the popularity of "reverse slope" defenses which deprive the enemy FOs of the ability to look into your holes.

So the dramatic "overkill" observed in the game seems to me to derive not from some problem with the modeled accuracy or speed of the mortar teams / FOs, but from:

(1) non-moving infantry in good concealment terrain, even dug-in, are far too easy to spot with precision, at a distance. Spotting seems to be all-or-nothing; once a unit is spotted, the spotting unit invariably knows its position down to the meter. Pickle, meet bucket. Reality is of course far more tenuous; you "spotted" muzzle flashes, or a helmet bobbed up, or just sensed something moving in the direction the shooting is coming from.

(2) excessive lethality of non-direct mortar hits against dug-in or comparably covered infantry, particularly those in buildings or wooden bunkers (honestly, units in the latter should be essentially impervious to light mortar fire -- the weakness seems to be the vision slits). Suppression and shock, yes. Wounds, not so much, at least not so quickly. I have watched medium mortars breach a hedgerow in 2 minutes; that kind of demolition simply wasn't possible with ordinary frag rounds (unlike gun shells which plow into the earth before detonating).

One tweak that might help a lot is to have entrenched infantry prefer to fight (shoot and spot) prone, as opposed to sitting up so much and exposing 50% of their bodies to incoming of all kinds. They seem to "take a knee" even when their position already has a good field of fire.

Another fix would be to radically decrease the spottability of entrenchments from "vehicle" class to "infantry" class. Right now, entrenched infantry are spotted about 3x as fast as unentrenched infantry in the same terrain.

Light and medium mortar fire, or any direct fire weapon for that matter, simply shouldn't be able to clean out a concealed and dug in position so fast at combat ranges. It's a real game unbalancer.

FWIW.

[akd]

a direct hit on the foxhole. other than that it's just suppression - forcing the guys take cover.

Unless their heads are above ground level, which in CMBN is often the case. Even hiding troops will occasionally go to "spotting" status, which means they are partially exposed. I think direct hits may be overly generous, as well, given the exaggerated footprint of CM foxholes/trenches.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Another fix would be to radically decrease the spottability of entrenchments from "vehicle" class to "infantry" class. Right now, entrenched infantry are spotted about 3x as fast as unentrenched infantry in the same terrain.

A quick point; check out the many photos of Allied foxholes in Normandy. In all examples I have seen, there has been no attempt at all to use cam and concealment. The result of course, is that they stick out like the proverbial beer mat on a billiard table. The reason (of course) is that given their total air superiority, Allied troops really didn't feel the need!

I think that - for the Allies at anyrate - Battlefront have got this about right. On the other hand, the Germans were meticulous about camming up their positions, and this does not seem to have been allowed for in the simulation.

In terms of coding, would this be fixable?

SLR

[LongLeftFlank]

Do you have any links to shots that show the positions as the enemy would have "seen" them, as opposed to standing right behind the thing looking down into it? As you know, photographic "evidence" can be deceptive. Most photos are taken well after the action and are posed for dramatic effect, not authentic illustrations of tactical drill. Consider some of the shots included in CMBN itself -- the GI with the grease gun sitting with his ear right next to the barrel of a water-cooled Browning.

EDIT: I'm sure the inexperienced GIs arriving in Normandy committed some entrenchment faux pas. I'm equally sure the Germans taught them the hard way how to do it properly....