RE: Understanding British infantry
Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2015 4:00 pm
ORIGINAL: Stimpak
Well, couldn't be terribly relevant in Berlin where your life expectancy would be less than 30 minutes anyway.
Eitherway, most of the "Glass Cannons" have evolved on the modern principle that "First Sight is First Blood", that being who ever sees the other guy first will shoot first, and the guy who shoots first generally kills first.
You can really see the gulf between, for example, the Leopards 1 and 2 however. The West Germans figured out that you might not always get your perfect ambush and will need to tank fire [:D]
Eh, I dunno. Berlin was a nasty place to fight even in 1945; by the late eighties, it wasn't going to be a holiday for an attacker either. While no one truly thought the NATO forces in Berlin could actually stop the East Germans and Russians from taking the city, the goal was to make the process so painful and prolonged that the Pact would isolate and bypass, or if they did engage, throw in forces that could have been better employed elsewhere.
Simply targeting stuff would have been a nightmare. During exercises they'd spread out throughout the city and you'd walk along and stumble on mortar carriers disguised as dumpsters and stuff like that. I suspect that, had the balloon gone up, the Pact would have surrounded, cut off, and tried to starve out the city, after striking at the comms and intel facilities there, as well as the airports. There was little reason to really mount a full-on assault, though we'll never know.
But beyond that, the point is quite relevant I think--as you point out, being able to survive is if nothing else good insurance against not getting the first effective shot in. And in WWII, tanks generally were used for a lot of things other than killing other tanks, and heavy armor in those cases was quite relevant. A machine-gun on a truck is less effective than one on a tank when subjected to mortar and machine gun fire itself, etc.