Hey Designers : How About BIG Battles

[Matt W]

No idea at this point. Just getting the darn things together is taking some time. I am working off of Ryabashev's narrative of the 8th Mechanized Corps attack. The difficulty is that huge numbers of Soviet tanks broke down enroute to the battlefield so that the strength of these untis was far more defined by the distance travelled than by the resistance encountered. Although there were 5-6 mechanized corps ordered to attack only the 8th actually formed up in time to attack in any meaningful way. Rokossovsky, in effective command of the 9th and 19th basically threw his orders out. The 15th did attack but ran into much stronger resistance as the German infantry had been able to get in its way along with the 16th Panzer. Other commands were too far away from the area to have much of an impact.

The 8th Mechanized formed up near Brody and attacked northwesterly until reaching the Svir, using the 12th Motorized Division to obtain crossings at two smaller rivers. The attack hit at a hinge between the trailing elements of the 11th Panzer which had already reached Dubno, about 35 miles northeast of Brody and the advance elements of the 16th Panzer which had already been in contact with the 15th Mechanized Corps. At that point orders changed and the 8th Mechanized Corps was ordered to attack towards Dubno to stop the 11th Panzer in its tracks and force it to turn. The 34th Tank Division spearheaded this effort and ultimately became separated from the rest of the Corps. Under the command of the Kommisar Popel this division fought against several infantry divisions as well as the 16th Panzer and elements of the 11th Panzer (the remainder of which was the force giving Rokossovsky his heartburn). Surrounded, Popel was forced to abandon all of his tanks and the 34th Tank Division was essentially destroyed.

I may hold off on final design on these as the area is relatively flat and featureless. On the Der Weltkrieg maps it doesn't even register as broken terrain, this is "clear" for all purposes. As mentioned there are a few rivers meandering about but they only affect the first scenario and in that case there is only one river to cross as bridges were easily secured for the crossings in other circumstances. With the map "library, likely to increase by a substantial amount over the next several months I expect that there will be several in the new mix which may help better portray the area.

I expect to use some of Ottavio's rules for the urban hexes from Little Saturn as the current map mix results in a bit of overpopulation of the area. Deemphasizing the impact of these villages will result in a more reasonable result. Hills and forests are also a bit too prevalent in the current map mix, something that should definitely be addressed in several of the new map sets (not the hills but at least the forests...).

As far as counters go, I haven't compared the inventory to the needs yet. The 8th Mechanized Corps mustered over 900 tanks including over 170 KV-1s and T-34As on 22 June but according to Ryabashev suffered breakdowns of half of their older (mostly BT series, T-26 and T-28) tanks before reaching Brody. Still the Corps at Brody carries about 500 tanks (over 100 platoons). Consider the plight of the Germans facing this force. Their antitank forces are mostly limited to 37mm guns with some 50mm guns mixed in. Their tanks are mostly PzIIs and PzIIIFs with a few PzIVEs thrown in. One can make an argument that the German forces didn't even fight against the 8th Mechanized but merely contained them and waited until they had advanced sufficiently in other areas to threaten or cut off the fuel supply thus stranding the vehicles and rendering them harmless. Indeed, the 8th Mechanized Corps attack covered 35 miles in a few days and while able to move experienced little effective resistance. They simply were unable to hold the ground as other Soviet forces to the north and south were disrupted and retreated.

Much of the hype about the Brody/Dubno fight uses the fact that, in engaged armor, this battle rivals or exceeds the number of AFVs at Kursk. The difference is that at Kursk the vehicles actually fought and were destroyed by enemy action. At Brody/Dubno the forces rarely came into direct contact (the operational area would be a square roughly 30 miles by 30 miles occupied by three Soviet and parts of two German divisions for the first battle and four and a half German divisions in the later battle). Add to that the fact that, as Ryabashev points out, the older tanks, which represented the vast majority of the tanks in service, were prone to breakdown at catastrophic rates and supply, not combat, resulted in most losses from engaged units (those Pz747s at Kursk, which are captured T-34As, had to come from somewhere).