Battle of the Bifferno River

[Smirfy]

This one is getting the full Monty

[Smirfy]

For attachments we have Engineers, Churchill's (I wonder if Churchill's get bonuses for attacking in mountains), SP Artillery, AT Artillery, AA and Armoured Cars. We also have air support to the tune of 107 planes. Although the Germans have a clear artillery superiority one gun for every 37 men to our one for every 66 we are confident. Some rain no mud, hardly the Russian winter. Our 94,000 odd men and 250 odd AFV's and 1400 guns are good to go. The opposition, 2nd FJ Regiment 4000 strong backed by 107 guns and 2 AFV's. They are dug in a level 2 fort which would be standard fair one would imagine nothing our boys aint seen before. You know when we were conducting 1000 gun shoots in the desert and all apparently we lost that capabilty and have some mystical ceiling on our ability now. Anyway H hour approaches

[Smirfy]

The Airforce goes in first against the most vaunted regimental Flak!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????

My observations here presently are two fold,

1/ Flak losses are too high for ground support

2/ My personal opinion is if you have a one size fits all like interdiction the game becomes poorer for it. I would certainly not consider going down that route and will maintain ground support missions even though the losses are wrong by around 20 times the reality

[Smirfy]

The Bombardment

"At Tarnopol we endured heavy Russian Artillery but in Normandy we were hit again and again,day after day by British artillery that was so heavy Frunsdsberg bled to death before our eyes, it was worse during an attack, theirs or ours.....................Your artillery is my worst memory of Normandy"

Quite so but lets look at our reality

Okay we have a planned attack, all our divisional artillery has fired (sic) The Self propelled artillery attached to the Divsions could not be bothered and 4 out of our 8 atillery attachements appears to have had a go.

Even if we forget the SPA and 4 Regiments that did not fire we have 400 guns on line in a prepared bombardment. This aint the Somme when we say prepared bombarment, a Survey team would have put together a fireplan based on conditions on the ground.

1/ The 25pdr was the greatest suppression weapon in WWII bar none the ROF, range, elevation and portabily. yet a barrage here causes minimal disruption. As for the other artillery and artillery as a whole I am pushed to see how the 70% casuailties were caused. This is a bombardment, sorry overkill against a Regiment remember it niether kills nor suppreses's infact it is redundant, totally pointless.

"We would be terribly blasted I saw grenediers struck dumb unable to to move others made mad by the unceasing drumfire"

[Smirfy]

At a range of 3500 our mortars open up still no return fire from the Germans.


I pity the poor chaps that have to cart these things round as they do nothing

[Smirfy]

At a range of 3165 the Germans finally open fire with Mortars.

We fully expect the German mortars to be effective and they should be, I cant really qualify these results until the final tally. The 19 German 120mm mortars however were in percentage terms 500% more effective than the 358 25pdrs

[Smirfy]

When the range closes to 596 the 20MM flak open up on my attack


Again I cant qualify the results until the final tally though one has to remember Im losing planes to the same flak overhead.

In percentage terms the 4 flak guns are 3.5 times more effective than my 358 25pdr's,

[loki100]

Smirfy

I really fear you are not understanding the game engine. You are taking no account of morale or experience, or of aircraft types.

I've attached below 2 combats I've just constructed out of an onging WiTE game, the basics of the game engine are close enough that its comparable.

Now you sent in what are essentially fighters (P40 and Spitfires), I am assuming that you have allowed the crews to retrain to the bomber role but those are not the planes I would have chosen. You don't tell us how much flak there was but you lost 7 planes. The combat reports in WiTE are different but look at the top one, the Germans had near 200 guns, I used Sturmoviks (and the squadrons have Gds status, high morale and a lot of experience) and I lost 2 killed and 4 damaged (doesn't show in the report but in the combat resolution). A key variable is the attack took place in a blizzard which seriously reduces the impact of AA, of bombing and also the number of my planes that hit the target.

You lost 7 to flak, they have an armour rating of 0 (Il-2s has 2), in clear conditions, I lost 6 using a plane optimised to the role. So I see little unexpected in your result and a lot that you could improve on by thinking about the allocation of plane types to role.

Now lets look at your artillery. Don't know how many guns you had but I doubt it was 4,745. The attack I've shown is not one I'd do for real but its informative.

Set the combat resolution to 5 and you will see the sequence of the battle. In my case, a lot of those guns fired, but missed, others disrupted the enemy but inflicted no direct losses. Now why did my guns miss? Mainly experience, I've only just been able to raise artillery divisions and they are suffering for low exp = low efficiency.

In truth that attack succeeded as well as it could have (the German cv stayed static mine doubled), I still got nowhere near the 2-1 (even if I had the rare trebling of cv), but there are a lot of tricks around the managing of units, leaders, support units that can optimise your chances. I suspect you are missing the importance of morale, experience and fatigue as all feeding into the outcome

[Smirfy]

Thanks for the reply Loki, I am attacking a Regiment, losing 7 planes to the flak of an unsupported regiment is not optimum in my opinion especially when the loss rate was 1 in 250 in the tactical airforces, armour or not. As I have stated not including mortars 400 guns joined the battle. I have posted the results which are negligible. I will continue updating the battle when I get home

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Smirfy

Thanks for the reply Loki, I am attacking a Regiment, losing 7 planes to the flak of an unsupported regiment is not optimum in my opinion especially when the loss rate was 1 in 250 in the tactical airforces, armour or not. As I have stated not including mortars 400 guns joined the battle. I have posted the results which are negligible. I will continue updating the battle when I get home

but you persist in not comparng like with like? Does your 1/250 (which I am perfectly prepared to believe) cover all sorties or just direct ground attack? That is probably the most dangerous single mission, you more or less remove discretion from your pilots and tell exactly what to bomb (and maybe when), so far more risky than interdiction which leaves a lot of discretion. Since there is no reason to believe the Germans are a bunch of numpties, they probably deploy the flak at the most obvious targets. Its one reason why in WiTW I am going off direct ground attack and relying far more on interdiction. You don't have a tool like the Il-2 that was built to take that sort of damage, you are using adapted fighters designed to be agile and to trade off defensive strength?

so I would expect to see far higher losses for that mission than any other?

I'll confess, I am still learning the air war in WiTW and have turns of bad losses. Unlike you I don't immediately suspect the game engine is wrong but sit down and try and work out what I needed to have done differently.

[Smirfy]

To put it this way 9th airforce flew ground support over the Bulge at 1000ft and under including Bastogne and did not suffer anywhere near comparable losses to flak. Medium Bombers were the biggest victim of flak and their rate was something like 4.2 in every thousand sorties. Losses rose when the ground fighting reached strategic flak zones in and around the German border.

No the Germans weren't numpties but the Allies had large staffs, intelligence, recon, planning and countermeasures devoted to obviate flak losses, I'm not sure the Russians would have those resources human or scientific. The official reports on flak for the 8th, 9th and interrogations of luftwaffe flak officers are online.

Like I said just going to plain interdiction is wrong in my humble opinion, ground support was a fact of the War in NW Europe. Hopefully the game will give a place to both in the future.

[Smirfy]

Okay, lets continue now the range is down to 500 in our battle another useless piece of equipment, the Bren Mortar carrier.

[Smirfy]

Range 478, enter the finest suppression weapon in the Axis inventory this would have the boys eating dirt until they found mortars, artillery, air support or tanks (ill get to them later) that actually work.

Fair enougn there is only eleven of them, so we dont expect too many bodies on the wire, but they are still 130% or 11 times better than the 358 25pdrs

[Smirfy]

A mobile flak halftrack takes a break from shooting my planes down, always think all those German halftracks look really cool. This solitary halftrack is 23 times more effective than my 358 25pdrs

[Smirfy]

At the range of 414 everyone will be reassured to know after the movie Fury, the 75mm AT gun and their crews can actually hit stuff and at ranges over 20 feet. Cant really qualify the performance the only thing to note is the 13 guns were not interfered with by artillery or mortars.

[Peltonx]

so u saying your balls don't have enough air in them?

[Smirfy]

Our first Iron Cross winner comes in at range 376. A pretty oustanding performance for the under rated Stug iii, This single stug was a whopping 985% or 74 times more effective than our 358 25pdrs.

[Smirfy]

ORIGINAL: Pelton

so u saying your balls don't have enough air in them?

No just showing the skills needed

[Smirfy]

These Flak guys do Aircraft, HE and AP. Range 266 and 210

[KWG]

i agree with your concern over the artillery and mortars. it seems to me that they just dont fire enough. if all were ready your 358 25pdr. fired a average of 1.4 shots per gun...a 5 second barrage .. around 500 shells total. not much of a fire for effect. been noticing this in most battle analysis. i might be interpreting it wrong.

he and ap..... i dont think wp is modeled in sim.


would like to see the innovations that were done with the air war done for the land war also. priorities, defense types, assault types.... lots of possibilities.