The STAVKA War Diaries II - No Mehring please

[loki100]

great stuff from both of you. Can understand the importance of player morale, especially when what you've lost is the best formations in your army that you have just spent 2 years building up

think you both had a lot of determination to take some huge chances looking for advantage

[Peltonx]

Post #117 had it right. The center :0

Kinda amazed that M60 made not 1 but 3 screw ups in a row.

[M60A3TTS]

Mehring did a good job always having a panzer army or panzer corps at the right spot at the right time. I figured as long as I had a presence along the Dnepr, sooner or later the Wehrmacht would come west. Ultimately I suffered from a unit crunch as he nibbled away enough to constantly keep me in an AP shortfall.

The last turn and the resulting pocket was a combination of a couple factors. First, my air recon forces were down in numbers. Normally I have my air units on manual upgrade and the SB-2 recon aircraft were largely used up.



You can see that on the next to last turn although I had 3 regiments on the VVS base, only a fraction of the aircraft were serviceable. At the same time, the reserve pool for these aircraft were exhausted. Had I set upgrades to auto, they would have been replaced by R-5s, R-10s or U2VS recon planes. Although they don't have the range of the SB-2Rs, it would have certainly provided more recon missions to reveal what my existing resources could not show. Also, due to the chronic truck shortage in the winter of 42-43, much of the VVS had been sent to winter quarters. So I couldn't conduct many bombing missions to reveal more of what recon couldn't expose. In any case, it was a good move on his part and with my arms level at zero, replacing two fronts worth of troops was going to be a major undertaking as I was already challenged in keeping a continuous line. That problem could have been reduced had I not merged so many rifle brigades earlier, so subsequent plans now involve more brigades to allow for the extending of the line.

[Mehring]

Wow! Looking at your files I was so fixated on seeing the non-result of my oil strategy, I didn't notice your arms situation. In game, I attributed your lack of air cover to an attempt to save fuel [:D] guess all those mech corps were chewing trucks.

Looking it over again, the stability, even growth of your fuel and oil reserves may well be related the partial grounding of your air force. Losing Baku would have lost you half of your national fuel stocks as well as a big chunk of production and oil stock. Testing with the last version of WitE I was able to take the city so, just perhaps, and however risky, going for Baku and the Caucasus may now be viable.

You did have some Pe2Rs in the area but recon can be fickle. One flight went over the woods the SS corps and Wiking were hiding. But one advantage the Germans enjoy at that phase of the war, is to be able to concentrate a lot of CV in a few units. Recon, if it revealed anything, may not have hinted at the nature of the build up.

What confused me about your game was the pace of your attack in Belarus. I thought you didn't want me to come west given the lack of exploitation force and were hoping to reach Berlin without me noticing. And given my own plans, well, I didn't want to, but sight of a tank or cavalry army and I would have had to come running, abandoning probably all east of the Dnepr.

Another thing, I was wondering about my nibbling, whether by late summer/autumn I should have been more ambitious and elastic with the terrain I'd captured. Giving ground to enable uniting elements of three tank armies might have made a big pocket around Kharkov/Voronezh possible, though I suspect you had sufficient powerful armour to break through, as in any case, you often did on that sector.

[Peltonx]

Fun game to watch/read.

[Mehring]

ORIGINAL: jwolf

Fantastic AAR, kudos to both of you.  It's ironic that the Russians in this game were undone by a Stalingrad like disaster:  one deep penetration with the cream of their army and weak flanks that crumbled quickly.  Mehring, it seemed to me that you were really playing with fire during 1942 with a flank stretching from Minsk to Stalingrad.  Earlier you described M60 as one "cool customer" but I think that title should go to you!

In part, yes, the Stalingrad analogy works, but the distraction for the Russians here was hundreds of miles away on other fronts.

You flatter me, but really this game was on a knife edge for a long time, one of the reasons it was so challenging and absorbing. As heroes and fools are often separated by luck, so too are contending cool customers. If armour and cavalry had suddenly sprung from the woods of Belarus I'd look more like Nero, fiddling while the Turd Reich burned.