Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

[jamesevans140 2055xp 0]

Thanks for keeping in touch @oriskany Glad to here you had a great time at Historicon. Why is having fun so tiring.

I will be at WinterCon this weekend and paying for it later. At the moment I am knee deep in 4″ hexes.

Maths are good for modelling many things but it does have its limits. Consider a program created to predict the results of horse racing. It can historically look at each horse with its wins and losses. At what distances the horses wins have been run and the surfaces, along with wet and dry conditions. What it can’t predict is that the horse has stomach pains on the day of the race. Even if the program tries it has no historical data for the given horse in pain. So this becomes an indefinable variable. But this is life.

The Winter War is a good example of these intangibles. Some troops are well trained professionals that for the most part have not seen combat and the rest are trained but green. Most officers have seen at least two wars while the generals have seen three. Most in the army have grown up in a Finnish version of the boy scouts. In summer they focus on orienteering and target shooting while in winter it is cross country skiing and target shooting. So nearly all Finns are at home on skis and are well above average shots at all distances and many choosing to take their own sporting rifle with them. These rifles were the same as the Russian Rifle with the tolerances tightened up for much better accuracy.  Finally in the second half of the Winter War the Finns were running low on ammunition of all types. Finland started the war with 90 days maximum reserves. We have to remove the legend factor. Not every US marine was 10′ tall and ate nails for breakfast. Now we have the Russians who changed their doctrine during the war and heavily outnumbered the Finns. Most of the Russians involved had not seen snow before and had a fear of the primeval forests preferring the open with without cover. The early doctrine had units organised on the 1888 Prussian field manual, the same one that the nations go into WW1 with. Further Russian doctrine calls for them to advance until contact and dig-in. The line would be reinforced while artillery was brought up to destroy the resistance. The second doctrine makes contact but does not dig-in. Instead the front is divided into five zones. Left flank, left wing, centre, right wing and right flank. Think of these as conveyer belts. As the enemy does something tactically better the Russians simply feed companies into the appropriate conveyer belt in answer with all platoons moving straight forward. While the first doctrine was in use the Finns were offering resistance and after the second doctrine was introduced the end came quickly. I don’t think the doctrine charge alone was the winning factor as all Finnish troops are fully experienced at war now.  Most of the above cannot be easily given a number. So for games like PL I think it is a brave person who gives only one set of stats for the Russian and Finnish units for the Winter War. At the minimum you actually need desperate stats for early and late Winter War, then you would be standing on safer ground.

I have issues with the 17 and 6 pounder in wargaming as in the rules what they are referring to is the APDS round and not the gun. This is not helped by historians regurgitating war time propaganda about it that was trying to diffuse 88 envy. The APDS as used was not fin stabilised and tended to be inaccurate at ranges above 600m, so crews of the AT guns would not risk giving away their positions using this round preferring to use APCBC instead. The other issue is which one. From the Western Desert to just after D-Day the APDS round used a high strength steel perpetrator while after D-Day a tungsten perpetrator was used and finally just prior to the end of the war in Europe an improved version of the round was introduced with even greater penetration power and more long range inaccuracy. In the interim FoW Late War v4 rules used the last version of the round requiring us to use the v3 stats for the Firefly for use in D-Day. So among all this confusion rule writers tend to give the poor old 90mm gets. Given the practices used at the time at any range above 600m the 90mm should have a penetration value higher than any 17 pounder. At long range to 90mm round will not bounce off sloped armour either.

So speaking in the widest possible terms here my take would be at short range they may have been effectively similar but at long range it is superior to the 17 pounder. At long range it is rivaling the bite of a King Tiger’s 88mm. Perhaps it would be better to look at the bite of a M46 although it uses the 2nd generation of the 90mm it would have values of the APCBC round and nudging the figures down a bit to get a feel of where the 90mm should have sat in the US had shipped it with an appropriate round. The fact that they did not to me says they believed it to be power enough.

Yes there is a lot to groan about the action in the Lorraine. It was the largest tank on tank battle for the US and it was the only time when Panthers outnumbered Pz-4 tanks in the field. It had the makings of one of the greatest battles of WW2 for wargamers and then fell apart.  People also only talk about the Panzer brigades and often not talk about the rebuilt Panzer divisions that were there as well. Generally they were rebuilt to 4 Panthers to the platoon.