Retrograde and Kursk

[stug]

Beware that by choosing Retrograde you will receive all equipment six months later. That means no Panzer IVH, Panther D, StuG IIIG, Nashorn, Ju 87G available at Kursk mission... . Yes, very disappointing indeed. Tiger is there as it was introduced in November 1942.

Solution: To cut the corners here you can edit units.csv file to modify the dates of availability for these units respectively.

[Green Knight]

Originally posted by stug:

Beware that by choosing Retrograde you will receive all equipment six months later. That means no Panzer IVH, Panther D, StuG IIIG, Nashorn, Ju 87G available at Kursk mission... . Yes, very disappointing indeed. Tiger is there as it was introduced in November 1942.

Solution: To cut the corners here you can edit units.csv file to modify the dates of availability for these units respectively.

But... you did pick retrograde...

[stug]

Yes:) Haven't thought it through. Somewhat Kursk without at least Panthers and PzIVHs loses its merits:)))

[Green Knight]

Originally posted by stug:

Yes:) Haven't thought it through. Somewhat Kursk without at least Panthers and PzIVHs loses its merits:)))

Ah, I see :D

Then a quick edit is in order :D

[stug]

Originally posted by Green Knight:

Originally posted by stug:

Yes:) Haven't thought it through. Somewhat Kursk without at least Panthers and PzIVHs loses its merits:)))

Ah, I see :D

Then a quick edit is in order :D

I must admit. I did play Kursk with no new toys. Challenging breaking through and dealing with KV-1/42, T-34/43, SU-85. Memorizing was duel with SU-152 with a single most capable weapon at my disposal which is Tiger I. And thanks god there were only two of SU-152 I had to deal with. Otherwise these Zverboys would wreck havoc on my retrograde units (PzIIIJ, PzIIIJ/1, PzIIIL, PzIVF, PzIVF2, StuGIIIF, Marder II).

[deducter]

As a side note, I always felt games like this had an opportunity to explore some "realistic" ahistorical scenarios. For example, what if Citadel proceeded earlier, perhaps by late May, without waiting for Panthers? The Germans very well have had more success, since the Panther debut in 1943 was a complete fiasco in reality.

Here are a few select quotes from "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller" by Robert Forcyzk:

“The long-awaited Panther tanks arrived by rail near Borisovka, beginning on 1 July, and the last trainload did not arrive until 4 July, the day before Zitadelle was to begin. All the technical problems aside, Hoth had made little effort to ensure that the two Panther-Abteilungen had proper command and control or were integrated into PzAOK 4’s tactical plans. … One-third of the Panther crews had no combat experience and now they were being asked to go into battle attached to an unfamiliar unit with vague tactical orders. Making matters significantly worse, there was no opportunity at the railhead to bore-sight the main guns (which after a long, bumpy train ride would definitely be out of alignment with the gunner’s sights) or to set radios to correct frequencies. As soon as they left the railhead, Panthers began breaking down on the 35km road march to the assembly area near Tomarovka and by the time they reached it, only 166 out of 204 Panthers were still running. Two Panthers were completely burnt-out by engine fire.”

“Meanwhile, the Panthers in XXXXVIII Panzerkrops had not enjoyed much success in the drive toward Dubrova. By the second day of Zitadelle, von Lauchert only had about 70 of his original 204 Panthers still operational and his Panzer-Regiment 39 was wandering around lost. … Without reconnaissance or support, the Panthers blundered straight into a minefield and came under heavy fire. Tebbe was an experienced combat veteran but he froze in the kill zone, allowing T-34s from the 14th Tank Regiment to engage the columns of Panthers with flank shots from 1,000-1,200 metres. The Panther’s side armour was only 40mm on the hull and 45mm on the turret, which was insufficient to stop the Soviet 76.2mm BR-350A APHE round at that range (it could penetrate 60m) and several Panthers were destroyed. ... When the Panther’s long 7.6 cm KwK 42/L70 gun opened fire with their high-velocity Panzergranate 39/42 AP rounds, the Soviet tankers were stunned by the destruction inflicted and decided to break off the action. At least 19 Panthers were knocked out or disabled in their first real tank battle, in return for inflicting only a few casualties on their opponents.”

[stug]

I hear you. And I always say this any tank in WW2 was as good as the lack of ability of opponent to deal with it.
Also I have enable it an option Poor Maintenance. You got surprises as you battle through. Nasty surprises. Good thing Tiger unit has an award Survivor;) Otherwise I would say good-bye to it.

[oddball]

@deductor

Forczyk is pretty great, I generally recommend him to every enthusiast.

Operational readiness for Panzer formations in the months leading up to Kursk were in the low 20s to 30s vs in the 70s by the time of Citadel for non-Panther units. Similarly stockpiles were exhausted by the prior combats. If they had attacked before spending substantial time repairing and stockpiling it would have been an even more immense fiasco than what occurred. Hard to believe I know given the immensity of the defeat at Kursk and the subsequent powerhouse counterattack by the Soviets, but definitely true.

In addition you are kind of forgetting that simply winning at Kursk would have been a sterile tactical victory. The whole point of the attack was to enable Panzer formations to break into the operational depth of the enemy and destroy rear area forces. Without immense stockpiles of fuel, food, spare parts, ammunition and trucks that sort of deep penetration wouldn't be possible. The Nazis would have run out of steam a short distance from the battlefield, allowing the withdrawing Soviets to set up a new defensive line and regroup. Or, as happened historically, counter attack.

I personally would have liked the game to adhere more closely to history although perhaps not as aggressively as UoC2 does. The Nazis weren't winning this thing at any point in the fight against the Soviets, including the Battle of Moscow. Like, my sides, the idea that they'd have just swooped in and grabbed Moscow after the heinous losses in city fighting at Kiev and Smolensk when Moscow was :

* already prepped with immense defensive works and a large complement of men

* backed by large mechanized reserve formations receiving a large and growing supply of lend lease from the UK (as you probably saw, Forczyk estimated 20% of armor in the defense of Moscow was lend lease)

* at the junction point of multiple rail lines (but with bypassing lines well behind it) allowing easy resupply

* considered the heart of Russia at a time of national fervor and therefore highly motivating location for defenders (probably the most important factor)

Stalingrad but way worse and in the winter of 1941 when the Nazis had just exhausted themselves in Typhoon as explained by Stahel? Ok lol.

But back to Kursk and Citadel, the concentration on equipment misses the far more severe tactical, operational and strategic failures in play.

At the strategic level the Nazis completely failed. There was no strategic goal even remotely plausibly achieved by this offensive. The Soviets had already amply demonstrated their ability to defeat over extended Nazi formations, and simply grabbing empty space to make the area under Nazi control look bigger didn't move the Soviets closer to a surrender. A claim that captured terrain could yield resources flew in the face of the reality as experienced in the Caucasian oilfields a year prior: they grabbed the territory and succeeded in exporting precisely nothing back to their forces despite immense effort.

Operationally, the selection of Kursk as target for a spring offensive was again a total failure. No reconnaissance was conducted in part because the Nazis had apparently crutched hard on recon planes and aerial photography, and the improvement in the VVS and PVO by this point in the war pretty comprehensively denied them that data. Rather than compensating by conducting more and more careful ISR on foot and with humint from captured prisoners the Nazis elected to wing it because they figured the Triumph of the Will would carry them through the Soviets. This failure to penetrate Soviet maskirovka was so comprehensive that they ran face first into extensively prepared deeply echeloned defenses, exhausted themselves and were subsequently crushed by Soviet mechanized forces lying in wait. The fact that the Soviet battle plan is almost an exact repeat of their successful operational defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and even Smolensk (although this was in 41 and didn't really come good) complete with potent counterblow was entirely missed by the Nazis who seemed literally incapable of detecting a pattern in their opponent's behavior. This is largely down to their inherent racism and inability to take seriously a foe they considered racially inferior, hence their reliance on tropes about human waves and Asiatic hordes when describing the conflict after the war. The postwar Nazi analysis of the conflict is particularly risible today with all our knowledge of the Soviet side of the war and smacks of an attitude similar to that of players in multiplayer games who declare that their foe was a "blobber noob f****t l2p" while simultaneously being crushed by said "blobber noob f****t". Whatever your thoughts about the relative merits of the Nazi vs Soviet systems of governance, it cannot be denied that the Soviet model allowed them to engage with the enemy as they were while the Nazis were simply incapable of that basic element.

And then there's the tactical layer. Armor formations with virtually nothing by way of combat recon, infantry support, artillery support attacked along roads with no effort at tactical maneuver into the teeth of entrenched enemy anti tank defenses and pre-planned artillery fires. This is a total failure of leadership. You can excuse some of it by claiming that it was forced by poor strategic and operational leadership, but this glosses over the real and very serious decline in quality experienced by the Nazis.

Compare this ineptitude and inability to execute a combined arms battle with the same army's actions at Sedan. When fighting at Sedan the Nazis made brilliant use of small unit infantry action and artillery (with some direct fire support from armor and some mild air support) to fight and win an assault crossing and clear the French bunkers. They then used tactical maneuver to bypass centers of enemy resistance (including off road action and aggressive river crossing) and envelop the Allied forces operating in northern France and Belgium. This brilliance at the tactical and operational layer (and a lot of luck) led to the achievement of a strategic objective: the defeat of France. At Kursk in 43 the Nazis had fancier tanks but far worse leadership at every level from junior NCO to high command. This trade was clearly not for the better.

BTW, this is not to say that the Soviets magically became amazing at tactical leadership. The RKKA took heavy losses even in victory because they were running an army that had large numbers of junior officers with no formal training and consequently no ability to execute an effective tactical battle. The problem for the Nazis was that their superiority on the defense could not compensate for their total inferiority and incompetence at the strategic and operational levels, and that their tactical dominance was far reduced when compared to the 39-41 period. And then there's the other element. The Soviets recognized their tactical inferiority and built their operational conception and force composition around those failures, changing things comprehensively in 41 when under greatest pressure and only slowly adding back complexity to the TOE as tactical competence grew. The Nazis simply refused to recognize their relative decline or react to it with aggressive TOE and doctrinal changes until late 44/early 45.

[oddball]

Well that's an essay. BTW, here's Stahel on the Will :

Originally posted by David Stahel Battle for Moscow:

Understanding this has a lot to do with the Wehrmacht’s own offensive ethos, which itself has long roots in German military culture,60 but was sharpened by the adoption of new tactics and technology in the aftermath of the First World War.61 The Wehrmacht’s leadership was also accepting of the Nazi concept, personified by Hitler, of individual ‘will’, which denoted leadership qualities capable of bending events to serve any objective. Failure to do so was a reflection on the individual not the circumstances. The requisite ‘will’ to carry out an order or achieve an objective was therefore accorded decisive importance.62

Understanding this concept is key to understanding how the Nazis changed over the course of the war from a force capable of tactical brilliance to an inflexible, deeply brittle one. Another key element is the Nazi death cult.

https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/odonnell-dangerous/index.html

This is a large part of why so many Nazi officers thought the war was lost (as early as 1940 during the planning of Barbarossa this was a common belief!) yet continued to fight it! It also goes a long way to explain the suicidal fanaticism (and concomitant tactical ineptitude) of SS formations. Compare and contrast the performance of the Wehrmacht Panzer formations (worse equipped, better utilized, more willing to disregard orders and conduct tactical maneuver to avoid bad terrain and therefore far more successful) vs SS formations (basically charged directly at the enemy in complete compliance with orders) at Kursk and even more famously in the Ardennes.

The importance of the Totenkult is paramount to understanding the changes visible in the Nazis over the course of the war and the decisions they made even at the tactical level. The only comparable army is the Japanese. Contrast with the Italian army that fought largely as a nation state and saw the overthrow of the dictator and the (entirely rational) decision surrender when defeat became abundantly clear with the willingness of the Nazis to continue fighting even in the streets of Berlin after the rest of Germany had been lost and long after even the remotest chance of a change in fortune had passed!

Hitler himself called on the ideology of sacrificial death in his political testament written just before his suicide on the 30th of April 1945 when he wrote:

May it become, at some future time, part of the code of honour of the German officer…that the surrender of a district or of a town is impossible, and that the leaders here, above all, must march ahead as shining examples, faithfully fulfilling their duty unto death.(59)