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I played the poo poo out of CC3 / Russian Front. For some reason I still distinctly remember buying it at Media Play (r.i.p.) Sure it felt a bit scummy to just run away from the first few battles until you could afford a KV-2, but it was fun to watch the tank crew completely miss and obliterate the wrong building before getting some experience. And OT-34 tanks with 70m range flamethrowers. IS-3s by the time you reach Berlin. Or out of boredom I would make a custom battle to see if ~150 Soviet infantry could cross some open ground to take down a pair of MG-42 teams (the answer was generally no, and involved a lot of blood)
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Aug 16, 2018 04:23
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   A fresh hit on a ship at last.  We also hit a ship named, at best, for a mistress overseas.   Here is your daily attack run in China.   A fairly full day, with a couple of ships bombed. 
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Aug 16, 2018 07:06
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   I blow up Milne bay to keep things interesting.  They the blow some patrol boats up on the way home.  It's not bloodless however.  I think I'm going to focus on smashing the last of the light industry for a while.  I could have done without losing that destroyer.  It was just a destroyer thankfully.
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Aug 16, 2018 18:23
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They're packing 14 inch guns on aircraft now?
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Aug 16, 2018 18:30
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Something is wrong on Saturn 3
Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 18:32
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I'm trying to decide what I find more amusing: an upscaled ANT-23, or a gun that shoots torpedoes.
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Aug 16, 2018 18:50
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GenHavoc posted:They're packing 14 inch guns on aircraft now? Friendly fire?
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Aug 16, 2018 19:10
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GenHavoc posted:They're packing 14 inch guns on aircraft now? Apparently the 14" gun was inside a torpedo.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:29
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Jobbo_Fett posted:So is he the one to carry the ammo, or to carry the rifle? Ah, "Enemy at the Gates"...when I was much younger, I thought the movie was amazing. Then I learned a lot about WW2 by researching actual historical data, watched the movie again...yuuup...not so great.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:44
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I still don't know where the whole human wave idea came from. The Soviets were very competent mechanized warfare experts. There's a whole mountain of paperwork they generated during the war, it's a fascinating read.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:05
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wiegieman posted:I still don't know where the whole human wave idea came from. The Soviets were very competent mechanized warfare experts. It really got started once the Cold War kicked in, I think. I'm not an expert on the history, but pretty sure it came out of the West wanting to discredit the USSR and rehabilitate the image of some "ex"-Nazis (mostly military officers) that were now various important West German political and military figures. So the high casualties the Soviets suffered were obviously because they "cheated" with human waves, the uncivilized savages! When in reality, yeah, total bullshit and the Red Army was probably the premiere land army in the world by 1943 and definitely by the end of the war, very experienced and effective at modern mechanized warfare. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 20:14
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e:fb above
Ghost of Mussolini fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 20:16
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wiegieman posted:I still don't know where the whole human wave idea came from. The Soviets were very competent mechanized warfare experts. I mean, its not a thing that never happened, especially when multiple memoirs talk about the whole "URAAAH!" cry they would do in a charge, but, you know, its probably not the same as whatever general portrayal exists of it. Probably wasn't as frequent either.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:25
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Yelling a battle cry is not the same thing as human wave attacks where half your men aren't even armed, which is the kind of poo poo Wehraboos like to pretend existed and were standard doctrine.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:29
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There was also some anecdote where after the war the soviets were eating dinner with some us generals and one of them asked how the soviets got through german minefields. He answered that they just went through them which turned into "the soviets force prisoners to explode mines with their bodies" when the reality was the general was remarking they took less casualties pushing through with pioneers as opposed to spending way more time under german guns trying to go around.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:17
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Crazycryodude posted:It really got started once the Cold War kicked in, I think. Nah, the idea of the eastern hordes is way older than the Cold War. The concept of unlimited Soviet manpower burying the civilized West under a mountain of corpses is just an offshoot of similar thinking going back to the ancient Persians.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:20
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Crazycryodude posted:Yelling a battle cry is not the same thing as human wave attacks where half your men aren't even armed, which is the kind of poo poo Wehraboos like to pretend existed and were standard doctrine. Didn't know "Human Wave" was "Half Your Dudes Aren't Armed"
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Aug 16, 2018 21:47
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dtkozl posted:There was also some anecdote where after the war the soviets were eating dinner with some us generals and one of them asked how the soviets got through german minefields. He answered that they just went through them which turned into "the soviets force prisoners to explode mines with their bodies" when the reality was the general was remarking they took less casualties pushing through with pioneers as opposed to spending way more time under german guns trying to go around. Pretty sure this was a Zhukov quote "If we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks exactly as it were not there. To General Eisenhower, 1945. Quoted in "Russia: The People and the Power" - Page 207 - by Robert G. Kaiser - History - 1976" Allegedly
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Aug 16, 2018 21:48
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Didn't know "Human Wave" was "Half Your Dudes Aren't Armed"
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Aug 16, 2018 21:52
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Note to self: Stop making jokes around nerds
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Aug 16, 2018 21:52
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The human wave thing was also reinforced by the american experience against the Chinese army in Korea where mass infantry attacks from poorly equipped troops were common at first. Also what that guy said about the propaganda origins behind our perceptions about the red army. The red army pushed the nazis back almost entirely by themselves, then after they had taken Berlin, shopped their army the way to Manchuria and then kicked the living poo poo out of the Japanese. It’s maybe one of the most incredible war stories of all history. All minimized because of the Cold War.
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Aug 16, 2018 22:11
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let's not get all the way ahead of ourselves with the "entirely by themselves" bit
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Aug 16, 2018 22:17
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They did, in fairness, get a huge amount of help from Lend Lease with which to do all of that fighting, but yes, Soviet claims to have won the war by themselves are complicated by the fact that they effectively did just that. EDIT: That said, the soviets were definitely using human wave style assaults early in the war and against the Finns. The casualty figures they suffered through that war speak for themselves, really. Someone was doing an awful lot of dying over there, and the Soviet antipathy towards the human cost of their tactics is too well attested to be nothing but propaganda. Seelowe Heights involved a hell of a lot of direct marching into the teeth of enemy fire, and that was near the end of the war. And the penal battalions were definitely used as mine-clearers on more than one occasion by having them link arms and run forward. GenHavoc fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 22:17
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There is a reason that post war NATO doctrine for war in Europe was basically "ok token force of dudes as a tripwire then NUKES", and also part of the reason the Marshall plan was so readily accepted by the US...because it was very well known that even with all the NATO land armies combined the Red Army was a FAR superior fighting force.
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Aug 16, 2018 22:22
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GenHavoc posted:They did, in fairness, get a huge amount of help from Lend Lease with which to do all of that fighting, but yes, Soviet claims to have won the war by themselves are complicated by the fact that they effectively did just that. A big slice of the high casualties they suffered is massive encirclements/setbacks during the first year or so of the war and the whole, y'know, genocide thing the fascists were doing rather than the perfidious Slav not valuing human life. Seelowe Heights' casualty rate was no worse than D-Day's (or even a bit lower depending on who's numbers you believe), which is not at all surprising when attacking uphill, across a river, and through a swamp against a series of fortified strongpoints. Clearing minefields by having convicts run across them is an utterly absurd myth that no commander with a modicum of real military training would consider, and I can't find any reputable sources on it being actually attempted on a large scale anywhere except for a few times during the Iran-Iraq War (where, obviously, it just ended with all the charging unprotected men immediately getting shot and not clearing any mines). Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 22:38
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Crazycryodude posted:A big slice of the high casualties they suffered is massive encirclements/setbacks during the first year or so of the war and the whole, y'know, genocide thing the fascists were doing rather than the perfidious Slav not valuing human life. Seelowe Heights' casualty rate was no worse than D-Day's (or even a bit lower depending on who's numbers you believe), which is not at all surprising when attacking uphill, across a river, and through a swamp against a series of fortified strongpoints. Clearing minefields by having convicts run across them is an utterly absurd myth that no commander with a modicum of real military training would consider, and I can't find any reputable sources on it being actually attempted on a large scale anywhere except for a few times during the Iran-Iraq War (where, obviously, it just ended with all the charging unprotected men immediately getting shot and not clearing any mines). Trotter talks about it in A Frozen Hell, and so does Beevor in his Battle of Berlin book, in both cases drawing on sources from the Winter and Russo-German wars respectively. Trotter mentions that the Soviets apparently also occasionally cleared minefields by running herds of horses into them.
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Aug 16, 2018 23:00
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I haven't read A Frozen Hell but if I remember The Fall of Berlin right, Beevor talks about how shtraf companies were used here and there to probe and confirm safe routes through minefields, while being supported by regular troops, which is pretty grim but still a pragmatic and non-suicidal use of forces. That's not the same thing as having them literally link arms and walk across an open field to clear a minefield by stepping on all the mines.
Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 23:17
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Crazycryodude posted:That's not the same thing as having them literally link arms and walk across an open field to clear a minefield by stepping on all the mines. Did the Basij actually do this in the Iran-Iraq War, or is that also apocryphal?
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Aug 16, 2018 23:24
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GenHavoc posted:Trotter mentions that the Soviets apparently also occasionally cleared minefields by running herds of horses into them. I did something like that once in a DND game. Bunch of mages had trapped the poo poo out of the approach to a fortified bailey with a bunch of fire trap and symbol spells and were blasting the poo poo out of us. I set them all off by stampeding cattle up the hill.
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Aug 16, 2018 23:57
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The argument behind the soviets doing it by themselves is that by stalingrad they had seen very little of that lend lease and what had arrived was still being sorted. Plus as far as axis troops outside of the eastern front it had not reached the roughly 1/3 in w europe 2/3 in east ratio that there was at the end of the war, so the soviets did basically beat them at stalingrad by themselves. That being said, without lend lease they would have been unable to sustain operational tempo to push to berlin by '45 and if had remained soviets vs axis there is a chance there would have been some sort of armistice called and maybe even minor territorial concessions made to the axis. So it is very true the soviets broke the wehrmacht by themselves in 42-43, not true they won the war.
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Aug 17, 2018 00:17
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15 August 1944 I hope you're not tired of German minesweepers sinking, yet, because a British and Canadian surface action group sank M-385 today off the Breton coast. Then we move to Mediterranean France for a change as Dragoon kicks off. Allied naval and air forces sink a number of small German combatants both in harbor raids and skirmishes, including the corvette Uj-6081 (ex-Italian Camoscio) (this ship was actually boarded by USS Somers before sinking and charts and orders were recovered) and the escorts SG-21 and SG-25 (ex-French avisos Chamois and La Curieuse).
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Aug 17, 2018 00:19
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I always thought the whole rifle shortage and the ""One man gets the rifle, the next gets the ammo" thing, came out of the Russian army in the First World War. For instance, from Kevin Stubb's "Race to the Front: The Materiel Conditions of Coalition Strategy in the Great War"quote:Another myth arising out of the Great War concerns the Russian failure to provide enough rifles for its army. Historians use this shortage as another example of the ineptitude of the Romanov dynasty. While Russia suffered a rifle shortage in WWI, they were not alone. In fact, everyone suffered a rifle shortage in 1914, as well as shortages in almost every category of supply. The Russian experience was typical, not an exception. However, Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, sent unarmed men into offensive operations without weapons. During 1915, Russia lost its Polish provinces to the Central Powers and desperation forced the Russians to feed men into the battle indiscriminately. It is a tribute to Russian morale that Russian soldiers fought even when they lacked the means to do so, [Then he goes on to talk about various nation's small arms production]. He footnotes in this section W. Bruce Lincoln's "Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians at War and Revolution, 1914-1918, which I'm pretty sure is about a quote from General Belyaev saying that in 1915, a third of Russian soldiers lacked rifles.
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Aug 17, 2018 00:30
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Epicurius posted:I always thought the whole rifle shortage and the ""One man gets the rifle, the next gets the ammo" thing, came out of the Russian army in the First World War. For instance, from Kevin Stubb's "Race to the Front: The Materiel Conditions of Coalition Strategy in the Great War" I happen to have Bruce Lincoln's Passage Through Armageddon on my bookshelf so here are the relevant sections: pp. 89-90 posted:Russia lost hundreds of thousands of weapons as well as men before the end of 1914. During peacetime, General Danilov reported, commanders instructed every soldier that, "if he was wounded, he should give his rifle and cartridges to a noncommissioned officer or, at the very least, to the comrade nearest him, before he went to a dressing station for help." In battle, no one paid any attention to such instructions and simply left their weapons wherever they happened to fall. Able-bodied men sometimes "forgot" to take their rifles when they moved to another position, and often threw them away during retreats. There were even reports that Russian soldiers used precious reserve supplies of rifles to build roofs to shield their trenches from the rain and snow. Soldiers drafter after the war began therefore had no rifles to train with and, before the first snows fell, many of these new draftees actually went to the front lines unarmed. "Reinforcements are coming in well, but half of them have no rifles, as the troops are losing masses [and] there is nobody to collect them on the battlefields," Nicholas wrote to Alexandra when the war was not yet four months old. At one point, the Russian high command offered to pay bonuses of six rubles for every Russian rifle, and five rubles for every Austrian rifle collected from the battlefields, but this effort, as General Knox noted sadly, "had no useful result." So that's pretty bad. But wait! It gets worse. pp. 121-122 posted:At winter's end [1915 - vyelkin], Russia's depots had no rifles to send Brusilov or anyone else at the front. Even at the beginning of the war, recruits had trained with antiquated Berdan rifles left over from the last Russo-Turkish War, but now even these had become so scarce that only one could be issued to every tenth man. In some cases, entire battalions trained without rifles. "Could anything be more distressing?" Minister of Foreign Affairs Sazonov exclaimed one day in February as he and Paleologue crossed the great drill field on Petrograd's Champs-de-Mars. "There are perhaps a thousand men there . . . and--you can see for yourself--there's not a rifle anywhere!" p. 129 posted:Before the end of May, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich reported to the tsar that unreplaced losses in Russia's armies were approaching 400,000 men, and that reinforcements sent directly from assembly points in Russia were worthless. Many of these arrived without weapons and many more did not even know how to fire the rifles they carried. "There are almost no rifles for the replacements that are arriving," Nikolai Nikolaevich warned, "and the few that are available are but a drop in the ocean." Well that's also pretty bad! How long does it take for it to get better? Here's September 1915 p. 165 posted:Although they had been on a war footing for a year, Russia's weapons factories still could replace only one out of every three of the rifles her soldiers lost in combat, and General Staff weapons experts estimated that they needed about two million new rifles just to make up those losses and arm the men being called up that fall. So many Russian soldiers had no weapons at the end of the Great Retreat that General Alekseev thought it an accomplishment worthy of mention when he could report in January 1916 that seven out of every ten of his front-line troops now had a rifle. Not until later in 1916 would Russia's rifle shortage end, and there would not be sufficient bullets until that time either.
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Aug 17, 2018 02:42
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I think like a lot of military history, there are gross exaggerations, but they are often based on a kernel of truth. I recently finished an excellent book called Case Red about the collapse of France in 1940*, and it even talks about how several thousand British troops sent to the continent were there as rear-echelon laborers and many had no weapons or serious training. And I think this was largely political, to give the appearance of a larger and more formidable commitment. I figure most armies at one time or another, because of a current crisis, have made some pretty unpleasant and desperate decisions to sacrifice their own troops, or throw unprepared formations into the front line to buy time. And in this game it basically happens everytime someone invades an island or attacks across a river. (* for example, lots of people blame the huge expense of the Maginot Line, at roughly 5 billion Francs. But building a fancy naval base at Mers-El-Kabir cost well over 3 billion Francs and it contributed nothing to stopping Germany)
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Aug 17, 2018 03:01
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Feb 44 and I've taken Manila, Guam and Saipan, let's buzz Okinawa and see what the air defense is like Afternoon Air attack on TF, near Daito Shoto at 103,71 Weather in hex: Heavy rain Raid detected at 80 NM, estimated altitude 11,000 feet. Estimated time to target is 26 minutes Japanese aircraft B6N2 Jill x 24 Ki-57-II Topsy x 24 Allied aircraft F6F-3 Hellcat x 5 Japanese aircraft losses B6N2 Jill: 15 destroyed B6N2 Jill: 1 destroyed by flak Ki-57-II Topsy: 15 destroyed Ki-57-II Topsy: 1 destroyed by flak No Allied losses Allied Ships CVL Monterey, Kamikaze hits 7, heavy fires, heavy damage CLAA Reno, Kamikaze hits 2 CA Baltimore, Kamikaze hits 1 CA Vincennes, Kamikaze hits 1 DD Hoel, Kamikaze hits 2, on fire, heavy damage Afternoon Air attack on TF, near Daito Shoto at 103,71 Weather in hex: Heavy rain Raid detected at 80 NM, estimated altitude 9,000 feet. Estimated time to target is 25 minutes Japanese aircraft Ki-49-IIb Helen x 27 Allied aircraft F6F-3 Hellcat x 1 Japanese aircraft losses Ki-49-IIb Helen: 17 destroyed Ki-49-IIb Helen: 1 destroyed by flak No Allied losses Allied Ships CA Vincennes, Kamikaze hits 1, on fire CA Baltimore, Kamikaze hits 1 CLAA Oakland DD Franks CVL Monterey, and is sunk DD Hoel, on fire, heavy damage Afternoon Air attack on TF, near Daito Shoto at 103,71 Weather in hex: Heavy rain Raid detected at 21 NM, estimated altitude 11,000 feet. Estimated time to target is 7 minutes Japanese aircraft G4M2 Betty x 27 Japanese aircraft losses G4M2 Betty: 18 destroyed Allied Ships DD Hoel, Kamikaze hits 1, on fire, heavy damage CLAA Reno, Kamikaze hits 1, on fire, heavy damage CA Baltimore, Kamikaze hits 1, on fire CLAA Oakland, Kamikaze hits 4, on fire, heavy damage CA Vincennes, on fire DD Stanly DD Hazelwood DD Bush, Kamikaze hits 1 DD Terry But hey, I got 86 operational kills! 
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Aug 17, 2018 03:04
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Ron Jeremy posted:The human wave thing was also reinforced by the american experience against the Chinese army in Korea where mass infantry attacks from poorly equipped troops were common at first. Right. There's more credence to characterize the experiences with North Korean and Chinese armies as massed infantry attacks in the sense that a lack of artillery meant that the "fire" of "fire-and-maneuver" had to be applied directly with small arms, rather than the indirect artillery fire that every other army did (though the Chinese/NK were also very good at infiltration tactics). Epicurius posted:I always thought the whole rifle shortage and the ""One man gets the rifle, the next gets the ammo" thing, came out of the Russian army in the First World War. For instance, from Kevin Stubb's "Race to the Front: The Materiel Conditions of Coalition Strategy in the Great War" Norman Stone's "The Eastern Front 1914-1917" also supports this - Tsarist Russia was perennially short on war materiel.
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Aug 17, 2018 03:43
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There are also anecdotes - especially during the early stages of Barbarossa - that Soviet officers would operate strictly by the book, especially with a political commissar watching and judging every decision. Apparently seizing and exploiting any elevated terrain feature was a priority, so a series of fruitless attacks against dug in German units on a hill, well supported by artillery, probably reinforced the notion of human wave attacks. And I know ive read similar stories about tank attacks, even when the lead tanks rolled into an ambush and were pulverized, the rest of the platoon would push right forward into the same area and suffer a similar fate.
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Aug 17, 2018 04:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:
I also remember reading something like the railheads were set up in such a way that they couldn't transport grain around russia during the war so they all starved because the trains were designed to only ship them to market or something, not feed other parts of the country.
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Aug 17, 2018 05:50
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dtkozl posted:The argument behind the soviets doing it by themselves is that by stalingrad they had seen very little of that lend lease and what had arrived was still being sorted. Plus as far as axis troops outside of the eastern front it had not reached the roughly 1/3 in w europe 2/3 in east ratio that there was at the end of the war, so the soviets did basically beat them at stalingrad by themselves. That being said, without lend lease they would have been unable to sustain operational tempo to push to berlin by '45 and if had remained soviets vs axis there is a chance there would have been some sort of armistice called and maybe even minor territorial concessions made to the axis. Isn't this the school of thought that sprung up among contrarian historians in the latter half of the cold war, that has since been debunked once we got access to the actual records when the Soviet Union collapsed? Not that the initial school of thought that the Soviets only won due to Lend-Lease was particularly accurate either, but there were multiple areas, well before Stalingrad, where Lend-Lease supplies proved incredibly vital to their successes. For the US shipments, while the actual shipped weapons weren't incredibly vital (even before they started getting rerouted due to US entry into the war), the logistical benefit of the enormous number of trucks and supplies shipped was huge. Also, and somewhat generally ignored, the British shipped a large chunk of actual fighting vehicles themselves, and looks into the records have shown that a rather large chunk of the tanks the Soviets used in the battle before Moscow were British ones (like, 30-40% of medium/heavy tanks large). The Hurricanes shipped over were rather well-liked as well, though the Spits didn't really fit too well into Soviet doctrine. None of this is to say the Soviets didn't do an enormous amount themselves, and would have eventually won regardless, but Allied war material shipped to them was still of enormous importance, and was so well before Stalingrad.
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Aug 17, 2018 06:02
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Lot of what the US sent was 'soft' logistics material. Radios, trucks, airplane fuel, higher grade materials for production, assembly molds and manufacturing equipment, locomotives, oil, massivea mounts of food, boots.. While the Soviet Union did not get remotely as many weapons and munitions from the Allies as they produced themselves, they were able to devote almost all of their manufacturing capability to weapons and munitions -because- the Allies sent them so much, and were able to make things much better thanks to Allied resources/better materials. Off the top of my head (Feel free to corret me as i'm not looking up things) roughly 80+% of all trucks the USSR used were from the US (The US had one truck plant producing trucks for the Soviet Union that singlehandedly made more trucks than all of Germany did over all of WW2 once the US entered the war, for example), 40-50% of all oil/gas the Soviet Union used (much sent in through Iran/Persia).. Almost every single locomotive built over the war in the USSR was from the US and Britain methinks. Soviet armored formations had thier own tanks and artillery. Which were coordinated by radios from the US, fueled by oil from the US and Britain, and moved by trucks from the US and Britain.
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Aug 17, 2018 08:29
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