[WarInEur] Pro-German bias

[sgminfo]

Chuck Sutherland wrote:
> Operational truth is operational truth, and blitzkrieg used combined arms and speed to win battles. This truth has not changed, the balance of power between weapon systems may have altered but the truth is the truth. And it was this truth that the allied took along time to grasp and counter. Had the Germans been able to supply their forces properly in Russia we would all have been speaking German.
>
> They were not lucky, they just did their homework and got it right as far as battle operations go. Fortunately for the world the allies had time and numbers and production on their side and those forces simply ground down the Axis.
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> Considering the allies knew what the Germans were going to do makes the case for blitzkrieg even stronger. It would be like playing a basketball game and giving the other team your playbook and signals and seeing now long it takes for them to learn how to stop you.
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> That operational prowess the German military used does not appear in the game system as it stands now because you can mount an effective delaying battle against the Germans.
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> Early on that should not have been possible at least in the operational area of the Panzer Corps.
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>   

One extract I read from a British officer's musings brought the lesson 
home forcefully.

His opinion,
In a nutshell,


The Germans  were not particularly revolutionary,
much of this had all been worked out by 1918,
But they were very good at it.

Lower formations had simple opening book approaches in standard 
predictable ways,
the revolutionary aspect of this was that commanders in the Wehrmacht 
were rehearsed in this,
and thus could place reliance on other units behaving in predictable ways,
ways that could be hooked up to and allow larger,
and more complex plans to take shape and be made manifest,
The general allied reaction allowed far too much low level ad hoc 
battleplay,
to the point that the multiplying complications
outran the ability and the experience of the field officers to cordinate 
their units.

i.e. experience and familiarity told heavily against us.

Once we had learned the moves,
their approach perversely played into our hands,
as that very predictability enabled low level counter measures to
operate with confidence and gusto.

So, it then became a battle environment which our field commanders could 
follow and thereby operate in, without groping around in the dark.

In 1940 many battles were not won by the Germans. they were lost by the 
allies, once things got a bit fluid and confusing, our commanders could 
not see the forest and the big picture, and once that sight had been 
lost the thread of the action went with it.

In the Western Desert Ritchie and other British commanders fell into 
this trap. When Rommel was forced to retreat the first time, it was only 
the timely stepping in of the vastly more experienced theatre commander 
that prevented the Army commanders from acknowledging (erroneously) that 
they were beaten and withdrawing in confusion.

Pondering this, you can then understand why the changing unit strength 
options is such a useful mod. Churchill was bedeviled by it, he saw the 
8-10s lined up (he knew the ration and toe's). But unlike in the game, 
he could not see that his wonderfull 8-10 was in fact a 5-10, or 6-10 
instead. Many basic actions went awry because of such a simple, but 
devastating overvaluation of our actual capabilities of the time.

Later in the War similar miscalculations as to capabilities and actual 
fighting performance led directly to many desasters in 1944-45 under 
Hitler's gaze. Mortain and Falaise were  prime examples of this, a 
fundamental misappraisal of the physical and organisational capabilities 
of the German Army, when faced with an adverse balance of circumstance 
and forces., a misapprehension not shared by commanders more directly 
linked to their fighting formations.



-|steve|-