Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

[oriskany 60771xp 0]

Good morning, @jamesevans140 –

RKKA is an old favorite of mine.  Awesome!  I just didn’t know if you’d seen that resource – definitely a great spot for players interested in the Eastern Front, especially from the Soviet perspective.

Glantz is very clear that the most common tank for Izyum was the T-60 with the T-70 turning up for 2nd Kharkov.  I suspected as much, without checking resources.  T-70 is more of a “Kursk” tank (1/3 of the tank strength at Prokhorovka) so I didn’t think it was around in large numbers as early as Izyum, or even 1942 at all … except wasn’t the SU-76 assault gun built on a T-70 chassis?

“When the Russians are unsure they ask Glantz.”  We laugh because it’s funny, but it’s funny because it’s true.   I mean, with the state of Russian archives at the moment, I wouldn’t be surprised in an up-and-coming Russian historian today has less access to his own country’s records than Glantz had in the late 1990s.  ?

I don’t think I can put all the blame on Stalin for the battles in the south in early 42. [Timoshenko]:  You could very well be right about that.  Timoshenko is just one of those guys that is flat-out boring to me, I never read about him so I don’t know much about him.  Zhukov of course is the operational kingpin, guys like Aleksandr Vasilevsky at the strategic level back in Moscow, and of course guys like my favorite M.E. Katukov down at the tactical (later, “tactical-operational”) level.  But the “old sycophants” like Timoshenko, Shapashnikov, Budyonny  etc., yeah, I just don’t have time for.  As a result I don’t know much about them.  Your characterization however, seems all too plausible.

At this point the Russians were pushing the T-34’s out of the factories and skipping some vital steps. – Very true.  The superb Stackpole Publishing T-34 in Action is more or less a compilation of interviews with some of the last Soviet tank veterans of WW2, and they describe over and over and over again the terrible downslide in manufacturing in T-34s between 1941 and 1942, despite certain improvements like the longer gun and the placement of MGs in all the bow positions (previously “reserved” often for radios the tanks never received anyway).  One example that kept coming up was the quality of the glass in the gunnery sights, periscopes, etc.  The glass became green and warped … so not only are you trying to fight with the vision from inside a buttoned-up tank (already a herculean feat) but now you’re looking through the bottom of a Heineken bottle as well. ?

I believe that the Germans use fast movement to balance things. Better coordination with support arms as well (battalion mortars, regimental heavy mortars, divisional howitzers, air support, etc).  regarding tanks, in PanzerBlitz we enforce rules that require the Soviet player to “activate” his units (a roll that doesn’t always succeed) and Soviet players have to move tanks around by COMPANY, not platoon or even pairs.  Soviet tank platoons that end the turn not stacked with at least one other Soviet tank platoon are eliminated (lost, abandoned, etc).  This encourages the Soviet player to keep his forces close together, in “simplistic” hammerblow blocks whose movement becomes jerky and easy to predict.

Of course such rules are partially lifted after Stalingrad, and completely starting in 1944 (T-34/85, with three-man turrets, dedicated tank gunners and commanders, and a radios in almost every tank).

But in early 42 and especially 41, such rules deliver a Soviet Army that actually moves and feels like a Soviet Army, challenging the Russian player to win with the tools Russian commanders had on hand at the time.  It also balances out their huge edges in numbers against much smaller, more agile German forces (which of course have much tougher victory conditions to fulfill as well.

Rzhev seems to be a self-perpetuating battle. God, it lasted over a year, didn’t it?

Even the Finns who will recycle anything did not like the BT.  – my man Katukov called his BT-7 battalion (9th Tank Division, later 4th Tank Brigade, later upgraded to 1st Guards Tank Brigade) his “Knights in Plywood.”