AAR Allies May 1944

[shermanny]

23. Allies catch a break with the weather, and having also more or less had to stand still last turn, that break goes to a fairly well supplied and rested army. Put that together with a German defense that hasn't had enough of a respite to get set, and there's the potential for fireworks.

Allies will have to do a reconnaissance in force. Air power won't find out what we need to know, but there are enough mobile forces that some of them can explore for weak spots and if they're found, others can exploit.

Tactical airpower lays a carpet of sorts over the likely area of intense fighting and maneuver. Strategic bombers pick away at remote pockets of intact German war industry. The infantry moves forward to scout out the situation and drive off blocking detachments...

[shermanny]

And things click. The Germans have forces directly in front of the main Allied mob, but they don't have much in the way of flank guards. The weather has been kind to us, as Octobers go, and the W European road net works in favor of mobile operations even in light mud.

Several German divisions are pocketed, at least loosely.

If the pocket holds, the Germans will be significantly weakened. If not, the pocket, or some part of it, will have to be reestablished next turn. Either way, a period of "digestion" will then follow. As in history, forward bounds come at a price to machines and supply nets and generally must be followed by lulls while work goes on in the rear.

A side remark: the US army had an especially heavy "tail". Far more soldiers were engaged in rear area tasks than were fighting at the front. Heavy casualties tended to cripple American divisions quicker than German (or Russian) units, because those casualties came from the teeth and the American division had fewer teeth. On the other hand, if casualties could be economized, or made good somehow, the heavy "tail" made it possible to bring up supplies and fix the rail net more quickly than other armies of the time could. All those guys plugging away in the road gangs and repair depots were a very real part of the war effort.

[shermanny]

Turn 24: Pocket formed on turn 23 holds, and the weather is not exceptionally bad. It's time to cash in having formed the pocket and go deep. If things fall just right, we may be able to close in on Berlin and get there before a lot of the German reserves can be repositioned.

Fans of "Enders Game" will remember that "the enemy's gate is {down}.

The Germans have evacuated Rotterdam which means we can open this port and bring in more supplies. The only snag will be that then we have to also hook it up to the rail net.

Italy is quite the mire at the moment. While our forces can advance through cracks in the German defenses, they can't finish off pockets much less mount serious attacks on defended, supplied positions.

[shermanny]

Here's how things looked on the active front in France at the end of the turn.

There's another side show going on: South France. I am putting a bare minimum effort into rear area security and screening and reducing the German-held zone of South France. With only a few regiments to work with, that goes slowly. The idea is to create "pockets" of German held terrain that no longer connect to Berlin. Those then flip color to Allied control.

[shermanny]

Turn 25. First, a look at Italy. The Allies are roaring through the plains of Italy in a startling Blitzkrieg Through The Mud.

Not.

The mud wins.

Progress is slow, and attacking is unwise except when the odds are very favorable. That German Fallschirmjaeger division in the mountains is likely to still be holding a month from now.

[shermanny]

Turn 25 in France. The Germans that had been almost pocketed last time got out of the trap. My forces couldn't close it for lack of movement points, a lack arising out of a lack of supplies and fuel and out of fatigue. We've come a long ways in bad weather and that has consequences. There's a lot of work to be done fixing rail lines and standing up depots. The weather not only slows movement, it slows RR repair.

[shermanny]

What about losses? Allied air losses have been heavy, with 12.6K pilots KIA (or POW, which counts the same), vs. 2.9K Axis pilots KIA. With so many multi-engine planes lost, the manpower involved has to be around 30-40K.

On the ground, the ratios are roughly reversed. Allied ground casualties are about 300K, Axis are just short of 1 million, about half that in POW. Axis "tubes" lost are about 20K, Allied tube losses just over 1K. Axis AFV losses are about 3500, Allied AFV losses are about 7000. But hey, those are just Shermans, and there are plenty more of them.

In terms of units destroyed, the Germans have lost (or merged, but mostly lost) 9 Pz divisions, 3 PzGren, 6FJ, 1 Mountain, and 32 infantry divisions, together with quite a number of support and flak units.

Another way to look at the quants is how much has each side got left? The Germans have 2.25M men, 36K tubes, 2800 AFV, and 1400 planes. The Allies have 4.2M men, 40K tubes, 16K AFV, and 15000 planes. So in manpower terms, the Germans are outnumbered but only by 2 to 1. In artillery, they're almost even. In AFV, they're worse off, over 5 to 1, and in planes, by over 10 to 1. During heavy rains, the AFV edge counts for little and the air edge counts for less, so the Germans can maintain the contest. Their bad supply situation (we control the Ruhr) makes it just about impossible for them to capitalize on Allied risk-taking, but those risks often can't be made to pay off for lack of supplies on the Allied side. There was a reason wars used to go into time-outs during winter.

[shermanny]

Turn 26. Total mud-out. Repeated attacks on Hanover failed, but a couple of other German forces that were trapped "out in the open" were forced to surrender. The RR and depot work continues. We lack sufficient administrative points to disband our many redundant flak units. Partly that's because I splurged on a few forts, at 4 AP's each, earlier in the game. I needed them at the time because there weren't enough ground units to watch South France and it won't do to just leave an entirely open flank. One Panzer division could potentially have gone on a 16-hex-deep riot into our rear area rail net, and with nothing at hand, it could have done further damage in the next turn.

Picture shows the situation at the end of the turn.

[shermanny]

Turn 27. First picture is a zoom-out of the whole theater. Allies have come a long way, and Hanover figures to fall this turn. The rail net is not caught up to there and it will take time to fix the railyards along the way as well. With the capture of Rotterdam, supply worries no longer revolve around shipping and port capacity. That's no longer a bottleneck. The snag is in the rail lines and the forward railyards. Both are in poor repair.

The other thing is the weather. While it's not all that bad this turn, the ground is muddy and more rain is likely. Patton can ask his chaplain to pray for fair weather for battle but this is just a game and the Great Designer isn't about to grant any such request here. We'll just have to cope.

We'll find out where the Germans are when we run up against them.

Strong points that don't lie right on our intended supply lines are best just masked. This game differs from WITE in its treatment of cut-off units. Those sitting on a depot can hold indefinitely. Those in a major city can plunder the civilians and survive for quite a while unless they're attacked and forced to spend their ammo. And those attacks can get expensive.

[emeg]

I have seen in turn 24 a very easy (unrealistic) break trough in the Rotterdam area. In real this was (almost) not possible, first due the (1,5 to 2 km) wide water body between Breda and Dordrecht and the Biesbosch area (a swamp with a dense network of water streams) east of it. But also due the polder landscape (being very difficult landscape to perform offensive actions) of the densely populated western Netherlands. In real the allied forces didn't took the risk to attack there, the Germans would then have flooded the land, being a extreme diaster for the population. The west of the Netherlands was liberated after the German surrender in May 1945.

[shermanny]

My opponent withdrew from the area. I don't recall there having been any combat to speak of.

During design, I advocated for making the terrain of this part of the Netherlands more difficult.

It cannot in any case have been entirely impassable because the Germans did, after all, dedicate several divisions to its defense.

[shermanny]

As we approach the endgame, I have an odd question for the designers and programmers: what would happen if the advancing East Front overtook an Allied or Axis unit that was in a hex slated to pass to Soviet control?

[carlkay58]

The Allied unit is pushed back out of the way.

[Enigma6584]

What a fantastic AAR! Thanks for doing this.

[emeg]

ORIGINAL: Shermanny

My opponent withdrew from the area. I don't recall there having been any combat to speak of.

During design, I advocated for making the terrain of this part of the Netherlands more difficult.

It cannot in any case have been entirely impassable because the Germans did, after all, dedicate several divisions to its defense.

Hi Shernanny. Thank you for your reaction.

Your opponent made the choice to withdraw Thus ignoring the historical fact, a personal order from Hitler, to defend Fortress Holland at all costs.

I know (I am Dutch) about the German attack against the Rotterdam area in May 1940 from North Brabant (the Breda direction). To take Rotterdam from the south the attack was supported by a successful German airborne action against the Moerdijk Bridges, built across The Hollands Diep, being the 1,5 to 2 km wide water body between Breda and Dordrecht. At the same time other German airborne actions took place in Rotterdam and the The Hague area, resulting in heavy fights with Dutch marine troops near the William (Willem) Bridge in the center of Rotterdam. In fact the Germans used in 1940 against Rotterdam the same assault method as the allied forces did during Operation Market Garden in September 1944.

But there were huge differences between May 1940 and the 1944-1945 period. The defending forces in 1940 were much weaker, and in 1940 the Dutch were defending their own population. The German's were defending enemy territory and after a lot of German civil victims too (by example due continuous bombing rains against German cities) there was not much mercy left for the fate of the population, also resulting in a huge scale famine in the western Netherlands during the last five months of the war.

As you advocated, the terrain in the western Netherlands (but also in other parts as between the major rivers) needs i.m.o. somewhat more attention. As Normandy have its bocage hexes, the map needs i.m.o. polder landscape hexes too. Polderland, being protected against a (temporary) higher than land water level of rivers, lakes or the sea, can be deliberately flooded (inundated).

Examples during World War 2 of inundated (by water overwhelmend) polderland are Men's Island between the Waal and Lower Rhine Rivers at the front between Nijmegen and Arnhem after Operation Market Garden, or the Walcheren Island after RAF Bomber Command breached there the sea dikes at several places (in that case to hamper the German defense) during the Battle of the Scheldt.

[shermanny]

Here's the situation at the start of turn 29. There just aren't enough Germans left in the area to form a strong front across the entire sector in front of Berlin. So we may be able to make a lot of progress during the snow turn. The good ground conditions favor an advance.

[shermanny]

And here's the situation at the end of the turn. Endgame, definitely. The plan now is to work around behind Berlin and then hit it from every direction.

[shermanny]

More heavy rain. Well, we can't have the weather all our way. In the meantime, some mention should be made of the interplay between design and testing. This run-through has brought to light a shortcoming in the East-Front transfer system. The system wasn't written with the possibility of an early Allied penetration into Germany in mind, it seems. German transfers from the East Front have been arriving in odd corners of the map, some in places that were already almost cut off, up on the North Sea coast.

We're suggesting to the designers that the arrival point should be something like "next to OKW" or "Frankfurt an der Oder" (the city just East of Berlin on the way to Warsaw.)

Picture shows the situation at the end of Allied turn 30.

[shermanny]

Here's the situation at the end of Allied 31. Berlin is surrounded, Axis forces in the vicinity have been scattered to the winds, and the city must fall soon. It should be mentioned that as the war goes on and Allied forces progress into Germany, German morale slips away. German divisions may yet fight well, and hold their ground, but if they are defeated, they tend to rout.

[shermanny]

Turn 32. Every bomber and ground attack plane available targets Berlin, all on ground attack missions. Many artillery units are attached to the corps commanding the assault teams. Those assault teams get two combat engineers and one SP antitank support unit per division, as a rule.

Twelve divisions attack, supported by an armored reserve. Berlin falls.

A word about the victory system---when Berlin falls, the game ends. If the end comes before late April 1945, the Allies score early-victory points. They also score all the points they might have got for holding cities in general, and all the points they might have got for bombing to ruin, or overrunning, German industry, over the span between when the game ended, and late April. This rule means that there is no point in the Allied player delaying the capture of Berlin, if capture becomes possible, to harvest extra victory points from bombing or city occupation---which is as it should be.

Another design tweak which suggests itself is that the game engine provide a running account, not just of how many points have actually been scored so far, but of what the score {would be} if the Allies were to take Berlin in the current turn. That way, both players could have a better idea of their prospects.

Merry Christmas, Europe. The war ends a few days before Christmas. And Merry Christmas, readers.