BTR in Nevada

[Legbreaker]

The more I think about the less likely bulk amounts of Pact vehicles are going to be available.

When you consider that it is standard practise to destory vehicles to deny them to the enemy (if only for the intel value) and I believe it's usually standard to destroy the enemies vehicles captured, particularly in the first months of the war, It's doubtful significant numbers are going to remain in any sort of usable form.

Also, it is highly unlikely that the broad, sweeping encirclements occured as it took litterally MONTHS for the NATO forces to cross Poland. This doesn't bode well for outflanking manouvres, etc but speaks more of head to head engagements.

Originally Posted by Webstral

They will have massive air support operating from nearby friendly air bases. The enemy will be tired from seven weeks of hard fighting. It’s going to be a bad, if brief, period for Reds.

As for the above statement, canon doesn't support it. Going from memory, the Pact air forces virtually destroyed German airpower before anyone else even thought about joining the war. After that may have been different as the US, Britain, etc joined in, but you also had increasing numbers coming across from China.

Large scale encirlements without air superiority are a recipe for disaster. However, this is not to say a vehicle here, a plattoon there wasn't captured intact (or close to it), just that these events are likely to have been few and far between.

Of course move the timeline along 6 months or so and you've got the Pact offensive back towards the west, nuking as they go with Nato apparently falling back in disarray. Now there's a time for massive amounts of captured equipment and personnel. Unfortunately it's the Pact getting the best of it...

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

The more I think about the less likely bulk amounts of Pact vehicles are going to be available.

When you consider that it is standard practise to destory vehicles to deny them to the enemy (if only for the intel value) and I believe it's usually standard to destroy the enemies vehicles captured, particularly in the first months of the war, It's doubtful significant numbers are going to remain in any sort of usable form.

I don't think it would be standard to destroy vehicles captured, especially if general orders to the contrary were issued. It is standard when a fear of the vehicles being recaptured during quick counterattacks or recrewed by stay-behinds and used in the attacking army's rear areas. This is why many abandoned Iraqi AFV were destroyed in place during both invasions of Iraq. Even so, many were captured and either shipped back to the states for evaluation and training purposes or given back to the new and "improved" Iraqi defense forces. If the abandoned and damaged vehicles were left far enough behind the FOB during a conventional war, there wouldn't be a need to destroy them in place, especially with dedicated recovery teams operating in full swing.

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

Also, it is highly unlikely that the broad, sweeping encirclements occured as it took litterally MONTHS for the NATO forces to cross Poland. This doesn't bode well for outflanking manouvres, etc but speaks more of head to head engagements.

I respectfully disagree. Encirclement battles were fought throughout the entire four year course of the Great Patriotic War/Ostfront, with both sides taking turns doing the encirclement and being encircled. I'm not suggesting the same sort of success for NATO that the Wermacht enjoyed during the first few months of Barbarrossa. NATO armies would have to stop and rest, consolidate gains, clean up pockets of resistance, allow the supply trains to catch up, etc. before embarking on the next envelopment. And then there are Soviet-PACT counterattacks/counteroffensives to contend with.

Furthermore, broad-front steamroller-style offensives are not a part of NATO offensive operational doctrine. Nor would NATO have the strength to sustain the attrition that would go hand-in-hand with such battering ram-style offensives. Look at the Coalition offensive during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom: deep penetration/envelopment attacks designed to distrupt enemy command and control and logistics and encircle large enemy formations. There's no reason to believe that NATO would change it up radically when fighting the Soviet-PACT. Especially since the Red Army was much more formidable than the Iraqis.

[Legbreaker]

I agree that while broad front is not doctrine, information in canon appears to support a slow moving offensive. This to me says large scale encirclements were very few and far between. This is not to say the odd small unit wouldn't have been cut off though.

It also implies that the Pact forces fought over every inch of ground. To do so would likely result in heavy casualties, especially front line vehicles. With the (at best) air parity, artillery and rear assets would probably have suvived relatively intact, pulling back from time to time to safer positions.

The can be no comparison between Poland in T2K and Iraq in either war. T2K details a very slow advance while both of the Iraq invasions were over almost before they began. In Iraq, masses of troops and equipment were captured due to the speed of the advance and the generally crap quality and fighting spirit of the soldiers themselves. I doubt the same could be said for Poland and it's early war allies.

[Webstral]

It’s true that canon does not specifically address the issue of Anglo-American (or Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian) air power in Europe. However, the fact that canon doesn’t address the issue of Anglo-American air power over Germany in December ’96 doesn’t mean that Anglo-American air activity doesn’t contribute massively to Allied victory in the opening stages of the superpower confrontation in Europe.

We know a few things about air power in Europe in Twilight: 2000. Perhaps the most relevant to the subject at hand is the idea that the SAF(1) leaves its most advanced airframes in the West, despite the ongoing conflict in China. [v1 chronology] Qualitatively, the SAF in the West is a match for the Luftwaffe, while having a quantitative advantage over the West Germans. We may infer that the Luftwaffe is nearly annihilated during the 06 OCT-30 NOV timeframe; I think this is a reasonable conclusion. However, if we’re going to be canon fundamentalists, then it should be pointed out that all we really know is that the Luftwaffe fails to provide adequate support for the Bundeswehr. I’m perfectly happy discussing what I believe is the likely demise of the Luftwaffe within the context of acknowledging that any speculation about the numbers of aircraft lost under what conditions is beyond the reach of the existing body of canon. (I don’t have the NATO Vehicle Guide, so I am happy to be brought up to speed by any information given therein.)

We know that the United States transfers III US Corps to Europe to claim equipment stored in POMCUS sites before the US joins the fighting in Europe. We also know that some US Army formations, such as 5th Infantry Division, were sent to Europe by air and sea in time to join the fighting in East Germany in December ’96. (US Army Vehicle Guide) In other words, while West Germany is duking it out in East Germany, the United States is REFORGER into practice. Canon may not actually say the USAF reinforces Western Europe to its pre-assigned levels, but should canon have to tell us that? If the Army is going to reinforce Europe to the level given in the US Army Vehicle Guide, then the only reasonable conclusion is that the USAF is also reinforced massively.

By 01 DEC 96, the SAF in the West has been fighting for seven weeks or so. Seven weeks of high-tempo operations are going to take their toll on aircraft readiness. Even if the Pact sweeps the Germans from the sky, front-line commanders still will be screaming for air support. The danger (as opposed to the likelihood) of losing the fight in Germany will seem so great to the Soviets that they are likely to feel compelled to maintain CAS and interdiction missions at the greatest possible tempo. Commissars may play their role in all of this, pointing out that tens of thousands of Soviet patriots have spilled their blood on the ground. Why the [expletive deleted] do the pilots deserve to sit on the ground drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while the battle against the hated Germans hangs in the balance?

By the end of November, the Soviets probably enjoy air supremacy over the DDR; this may seem good reason to ground the air superiority fighters, give the crews a rest, and let the ground personnel catch up on maintenance. However, the Anglo-Americans loom over the western horizon. One simply never knows when the Anglophones will get off the fence and treacherously join the invasion of the DDR. Therefore, some fighters will have to escort strike missions and maintain CAPs against Anglo-American involvement. As a consequence, the fighter crews may not be able to catch up on rest and maintenance as much as the air situation may indicate.

When the Anglophones join the fight, it will be with relatively fresh air crews, fresh aircraft, and a wealth of information about how the Soviets operate over Germany. The numerical advantage of the Pact air forces vanishes once the USAF and RAF (and CFAC) enter the war. I’m not going to reiterate all of the advantages the NATO aircraft, crews, and operational handling have over their Pact counterparts. To some degree, the experience in China will offset some of the inherent weaknesses of the SAF. However, the Allies will have good intelligence regarding changes in the Soviet application of air power due to the fact that Germany and China have abundant recent experience. Also, the Communists are firmly wedding to the idea of positive ground control because they are firmly wedded to the idea of controlling the military. Only in WW2, when the fate of the Soviet Union was at stake, did the political officers lose some of their power. Even then, it took some time for the effects to manifest themselves. Inertia is going to keep the SAF over Germany recognizably Soviet, even if a modest loosening of ground control improves effectiveness somewhat.

Given the advantages on the Allied side, there is no good reason to assume that the Allies don’t take control of the air over Germany in short order. Operating under surge conditions, the USAF will generate two to three sorties per day per aircraft, whereas the Pact air forces will have passed the time when they can generate a surge lasting more than a day or two. Therefore, the USAF, RAF, and CFAC will be putting their aircraft up two to four times as often as the Pact defenders. In effect, the sortie rate will act as a multiplier on the apparent number of airframes. Since one of the main missions of the Anglo-American forces will be to knock out runways and hardened aircraft shelters, the initial advantage possessed by the English speakers will increase dramatically in the first few days.

As for Soviet aircraft returning from China, I believe indeed the Soviets would transfer some air regiments to the West in October. However, this is not canon. Nevertheless, since I am not a canon fundamentalist, I will address the idea of transfer of forces by saying that the introduction of veteran regiments of late-model MiGs and Sukhoi into the fight in Europe would be a problem for the West out of proportion to the numbers of aircraft and pilots introduced. However, as my wife is always telling me, timing is everything. If these regiments of veterans flying late-model fighters transfer to the West at the beginning of the German-Soviet fighting, then by 01 DEC 96 they will be in much the same condition as the aircraft and crews left in the West: fatigued, in need of down time, and with a few kill markers under their canopies. If the air regiments in question transfer west once the American get involved, they will find themselves operating without their support. This may not be too much of a problem, since the arriving air regiments can operate from airfields in western Russia. Still, there are only so many ground crews familiar with the MiG-29, MiG-31, Su-27, and so on. Getting them and their gear from their air bases in the Far East will take a few days. By then, the USAF will have generated literally thousands of sorties. It’s a problem for the Soviets.

I do want to note that I am addressing only the fighting in East Germany at this point. Poland is another matter entirely, which I believe we addressed at some point in the past year. The introduction of ten or more fresh US/UK heavy divisions into the fighting in the DDR in early December will change the situation on the ground completely. Here the Allies will almost certainly attempt large-scale envelopments. Pact troops, overmatched by their fresh and numerous counterparts, will be obliged to conduct rapid withdrawals. In some instances, Pact forces will break completely. Under these conditions, some troops will dutifully destroy their own vehicles and hardware. Others won’t, either because they don’t bother or don’t have the opportunity.

Again, Poland is a completely different situation. I agree with you, Leg, that envelopments and large-scale surrenders will be few and far between during the Poland phase of the NATO drive towards the Soviet border.

Regarding the immediate destruction of Pact gear, there are a couple more users who might appreciate having some Pact gear: Jugoslavia and Romania. Whether a single BMP captured in East Germany ever reaches either nation isn’t the point. The intent to supply the new NATO members with equipment similar to their own is enough reason to hold onto captured gear.

1. Soviet air forces are divided into several groups that have distinct and sometimes overlapping roles. Rather than spend time nitpicking about which of the Soviet air arms does what, for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to roll all of the Soviet air power into a single umbrella term: SAF

Webstral

[Raellus]

I'm not sure we're speaking the same language here. Encirclement battles don't have to be lightening fast or bag thousands of prisoners and thousands of tons of intact enemy hardware. We're not talking a single operation with Bagration-like results. Instead, we're talking about a half-dozen (if not more), large corps-level encirclement battles, each lasting several weeks (if not months).

Pretty much every major land battle you can think of in WWII either started out or ended up as an encirclement battle.

For example, the hard-fought, rather lengthy Normany campaign ended up with most of a German army nearly encircled. The Allies failed to adequately close the trap around Falaise but the destruction, especially of material, was pretty spectacular. Allied failure to aggressively press the German army meant the war lasted nearly a year longer.

One tends to think of Stalingrad as a purely urban battle but it only became a massive German defeat/turning point when the entire German 6th army was encircled in a double envelopment and could not be rescued.

Kursk, still considered by some military historians to be the biggest tank battle of all time, was a failed attempt at a double envelopment.

Hitler's Ardennes offensive(Battle of the Bulge), likewise was an attempt to drive a wedge between two armies and seize Antwerp, in effect cutting off an Allied army in northern Belgium. It resulted in the smaller encirclement/siege of Bastogne. There are dozens of photos of Panthers and Tiger IIs either abandoned or knocked out without having been destroyed by fires and/or catastrophic internal explosions.

I just finished reading a massive book about the Korsun-Cherkassy pocket battles in February of '44. From the first phases of the Soviet encirclement operations to the German break-out, was about four weeks. Most of the two German corps encircled around Korsun were able to escape after over two weeks of encirclement but nearly all of their vehicles and artillery had to be left behind (albeit in very bad condition).

In that book, there are several accounts of Soviet tank crews bailing out after seeing neighboring tanks hit by enemy fire. One crew even bailed out when they heard what they thought was a shell hitting their tank. It wasn't even damaged. When German tank crews had time, they destroyed their tanks if they had to be adandoned to the enemy. However, when in combat, this was not always possible and intact tanks were abandoned.

So yes, it is entirely plausible that the NATO campaign in the DDR and Poland consisted of several large encirclement battles.

[Legbreaker]

This has got me thinking about my next project - to take all of the canon source material covering the initial 6 months of the war in Europe and roll it together into one, a little like I did with the 2000 summer offensive a while back.

[Webstral]

Envelopments often, if not typically, occur when the side being encircled aids and abets the side doing the encircling. The battles of envelopment along the Soviet frontier in 1941 and in other locations occurred just as much due to Stalin’s directives as to anything the Germans did. He ordered large armies to hold their ground, giving the attackers the opportunity to close the jaws of the panzers behind them. Sixth Army could have gotten out of Stalingrad if Hitler hadn’t put his pride ahead of the fate of his troops. The UN forces in North Korea during the first winter of the Korean War might have been enveloped by the Chinese, except that they withdrew rather than be enveloped. The larger the envelopment, the more the side being envelops has to participate in its own destruction.

Even into 1945, the Red Army rarely conducted deliberate envelopments. Stalin didn’t like them, the Soviet success at Stalingrad notwithstanding. Soviet attacks were conceived more as parallel wedges being thrust into the enemy’s front. The enemy would be forced to withdraw rather than be encircled. Where the defenders stood fast (thank you, Herr Hitler), they would of course be encircled.

The invasion of France worked in large part because events moved faster than the defenders could react to them. More exactly, events moved more quickly than the Allies had anticipated they could, and so Allied countermeasures to the German thrust towards the Channel typically were rendered moot by the rapid advance of the mobile attackers. Had the French been in possession of a better doctrine and a leadership not so inclined to think on WW1 time tables, the Allies might well have fared better.

In Poland, it’s entirely possible that there will be envelopments. They are unlikely to be the kinds of envelopments that occurred in Belarus in 1941 or Kuwait and southern Iraq in 1991. The Soviets in Poland almost certainly will use the pause in operations in that part of Europe (from the end of December through April) to construct a most formidable series of defensive fortifications. I think we all know just how formidable such defenses can be if constructed with a will and the kinds of resources the Soviets (and Poles) still had available. I won’t repeat what has been said in earlier posts on the subject.

On the NATO side, the goal would be to carve corridors through the defensive belts so that whole areas could be isolated and so that mechanized formations could break out into the open on the far side of the prepared defenses in Poland. The problem, of course, is that these defenses would be modeled on Kursk—squared or cubed. Having observed in China that a mobile attacker can have the steam taken out of his stride by confronting him with multiple echelons of minefields, wire, water obstacles, and well-fortified and camouflaged firing positions with overlapping fields of fire and connected by covered trenches and tunnels, the Soviets put into practice what they have learned in the Far East at great cost.

In this case, the Soviets tacitly aid encirclement efforts by basing their defenses on fixed positions. They are trying to buy time by trading Polish space. I think they would anticipate the NATO modus operendi and try to defeat it with mobile reserves. Just as the Allies try to isolate areas of fixed defenses for attention by light and medium forces which can attack the isolated defenders at a deliberate pace, the Soviets want to prevent their deep defenses from being neutralized through isolation. Ergo, there would be periodic counterattacks by heavy forces attempting to use tactical surprise and restrictive terrain to nullify the superior range of NATO main tank guns. The Soviet efforts don’t succeed in stopping the NATO offensive, as we all know. However, they do slow the pace of advance such that it takes nearly three months for the Allies to cross Poland.

The poor Poles. After all of the fighting in 1997, it’s a wonder one brick lies atop another anywhere in the country.

Webstral

[Raellus]

You make a couple of good points, Web.

It's possible, according to your description of Soviet defensive strategy in the early stages of the European Twilight War, that on a couple of occasions at least, Soviet defense belts were penetrated and Soviet/WTO formations encircled.

This would justify the large numbers of captured, viable Soviet AFVs. I was trying to help you out!

As a historical sidenote, the Korsun-Cherkassy operation was conceived entirely as an encirclement operation from the get-go and was approved by STAVKA/Stalin as such. He was rather keen on repeating the success of the Stalingrad encirclement. Despite early successes in severing the German salient in the Dnieper bend, the Soviets did not continue to feed units into the holes they punched in the German lines, instead being perfectly content to settle for a more modest double envelopment and pocket reduction operation. Envelopment operations were a key component of Soviet Deep Battle doctrine. Perhaps it was not the goal in all cases, but it was a standard operational contingency.

[Webstral]

Originally Posted by Raellus

This would justify the large numbers of captured, viable Soviet AFVs. I was trying to help you out!

I know, and I appreciate it.

[TiggerCCW UK]

I'm a great believer in making reality fit my game world, not the other way round. No player in a T2K game will ever know exactly what happened throughout the war, so if you want to have the USAF using Sov/WarPac vehicles for airfield defence, then do it. All kinds of wierd things happen in the military, I would imagine that would be especially true in war time. Back in the early '90s I was on a field excercise with my cadet unit in Otterburn camp, in the north east of England, and you can imagine my surprise at discovering there was a running T34 (not sure what model) parked up just off the parade ground. Not quite the same thing as having a company of BTR's in CONUS, but its just an example.