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T116 - overview

The Wehrmacht has staggered to tmud hoping for a brief respite and perhaps a few rifle squads.
I think hooooper has been sandbagging me. This is the last turn before mud - not random weather. So he did not get the big pocket in '42 but is getting it in '43. In other news, the German manpower pool is up to 350,000 and single engine fighters are over 1000.

Lucky for the Wehrmacht, the Soviets were overextended and unable to seal the pocket. They held the critical point with a single barely supplied tank corps.. In another thread, I mentioned that "SUs can kind of teleport around". In this case, at least two of the heavy tank battalions were assigned to the elite XXIV.PzKorps which was in the process of going into reserve in the area of the Valdai. On the second turn of mud, the divisions entrained and headed south, sending their SUs to OKH. The SUs were available this turn for assignment to support the attack that opened the pocket. As shown, XXIV corps is just arriving in the area.

To minimize the effectiveness of the Soviet breakthrough, I left Romanian units in the red circles until pushed out by Soviet attacks. This applied ZOCs to the green box area making it more difficult for supply to get through. Thus the attack on 3.Tank had a chance of succeeding.

T125- Last mud turn. Slight recovery in all areas. I have no idea what happened to the Soviet Airforce for 1 turn. I see this periodically. Looks like the bill is 3 divisions in the Valdai and one Romanian in the Ukraine. I'll talk about the slowly growing 75mm numbers in the next post.

One way to get 75mm guns into a division is to merge in a regiment that already has at least one. Once the division has even a single 75mm gun, the swap feature is no longer operative and the normal production logic takes over.

So, the LW field divisions all arrive with 75 mm guns. Starting on T116, I started disbanding them by merging them into the divisions that need 75mm guns. After a couple of turns of this, the quantity sopped shrinking and started to recover. We are still down probably 2500 guns from what would be historically appropriate.