Does anyone have Ideas for how the use of generals could be improved in HOI4?
What changes should be made to the way they are used and the effect that they have.
Best Generals of ww2 and their role in this game
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Does anyone have Ideas for how the use of generals could be improved in HOI4?
What changes should be made to the way they are used and the effect that they have.
Indeed. Model has saved situation on a strategic level for Germany on no fewer than 5 different locations in less just over 1 year:
1. Soviet summer counteroffensive again AG Center in 1943 which was beatifully held in check and resulted in only moderate Soviet advance and no major encirclement of German forces.
2. Rescue of AG North in 1944. Model was placed in charge of a force that was already on the run, yet he stpped the Soviet advance so decisively, that the Soviets were not able to advance there until after Bagration.
3. Rescue AG South Ukraine from the brink of disaster where it ended under Manstein "brilliant" leadership.
4. Restore a frontline in the East after Bagration
5. Holding the line in the West until 1945.
Without the man, Germany would have lost the war noticeably sooner.
It wasn't due to any effort from Germans - Red Army outran its supply lines, and simply could not move forward anymore. Soviets stopped, and Germans then had the time to rebuild the line - by pulling troops from the southern portion of the Eastern front, weakening it before the Soviet offensive there.
Not quite correct. The Soviets did outrun their supply lines, but kept advancing (STAVKA understandably wanted to secure as much ground as possible while the defences were weak). The intense battles near Warsaw in late August/early September, in which the Soviet forces lost over 1000 tanks became a "forgotten battle", leading later to a myth about Soviets intentionally not helping the Warsaw Uprising.
In many ways, the German counters at Warsaw are no different to Kharkov in 1943 (conting in the change in overall balance of forces). In both situations, the Soviets overconfidently went too far ahead, and got countered by Panzer divisions, leading to an embarrassing halt to the offensive. Only, because of the Manstein, self-hype everyone knows about Kharkov where he presents it as some "stroke of genius", by inflating soviet number and downplaying the strength of his own forces.
On the Defense, the Germans have the win, Gotthard Heinrici, the undisputed master of defensive warfare.
On the offensive, I think Patton is near the top.
For the best battle commander, Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, who leads in two areas. He's one of the best tacticians on either side in the war and had a massive amount of names.
If only Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky would have survived the purges. He undoubtably would be high up on the list.
On the offensive, I think Patton is near the top.
For the best battle commander, Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, who leads in two areas. He's one of the best tacticians on either side in the war and had a massive amount of names.
If only Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky would have survived the purges. He undoubtably would be high up on the list.
The battle of Prokhorovka was a german tactical win but a strategic win for the sovjets. As for losses
A document prepared on 17 July 1943 by the 5th Guards Tank Army Headquarters summarised the combat losses incurred by the formation from 12 to 16 July inclusive for all of its five corps, as well smaller units directly subordinated to the army headquarters.[148] The document reported the following irrecoverable losses: 222 T-34s, 89 T-70s, 12 Churchill tanks, 8 SU-122s, 3 SU-76s, and 240 support vehicles.[148] The document reported damaged vehicles still under repair as 143 T-34s, 56 T-70s, 7 Churchill tanks, 3 SU-122s, 3 SU-76s, and no figures for support vehicles.[148] The document reported personnel casualties as 2,940 killed in action, 3,510 wounded in action, and 1,157 missing in action.[148] This adds up to a total of 7,607 casualties.
Written by a Russian about Kursk and particurally about P, but no numbers
The costs to General P. A. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army and General A. S. Zhadov's 5th Guards Army as they slammed into 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Totenkopf and a portion of 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Das Reich were particularly devastating, and Zamulin examines the nuts and bolts of the counteroffensive to see why this was so.
Written about the content of the book
It accepts that German tank losses were much less than generally thought. It makes no effort to conceal Soviet errors of command and execution. It even concedes that the Germans held their ground and prevented a Soviet breakthrough.
But what really counts is that the Germans, too, were stopped completely. Their best troops, under their best commanders, failed to execute a comprehensively planned operation
A document prepared on 17 July 1943 by the 5th Guards Tank Army Headquarters summarised the combat losses incurred by the formation from 12 to 16 July inclusive for all of its five corps, as well smaller units directly subordinated to the army headquarters.[148] The document reported the following irrecoverable losses: 222 T-34s, 89 T-70s, 12 Churchill tanks, 8 SU-122s, 3 SU-76s, and 240 support vehicles.[148] The document reported damaged vehicles still under repair as 143 T-34s, 56 T-70s, 7 Churchill tanks, 3 SU-122s, 3 SU-76s, and no figures for support vehicles.[148] The document reported personnel casualties as 2,940 killed in action, 3,510 wounded in action, and 1,157 missing in action.[148] This adds up to a total of 7,607 casualties.
Written by a Russian about Kursk and particurally about P, but no numbers
The costs to General P. A. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army and General A. S. Zhadov's 5th Guards Army as they slammed into 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Totenkopf and a portion of 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Das Reich were particularly devastating, and Zamulin examines the nuts and bolts of the counteroffensive to see why this was so.
Written about the content of the book
It accepts that German tank losses were much less than generally thought. It makes no effort to conceal Soviet errors of command and execution. It even concedes that the Germans held their ground and prevented a Soviet breakthrough.
But what really counts is that the Germans, too, were stopped completely. Their best troops, under their best commanders, failed to execute a comprehensively planned operation
There is no shouting match. There is just you lying to yourself and blitheringly insisting that your lies are real, as opposed to the mountain of evidence already shown to you.
Others have already noted the stupidity of your sources, it still hasn't escaped my notice that you are very foolishly attempting to conflate Prokorovka as representative of Kursk/Citadelle or the entire war in general when it's been shown your entire line of reasoning is delusional fiction (and the Wehraboo deniers are too busy trying to change the topic so that fewer real statistics showing that the Germans were not even outnumbered 2:1 are focused on), but you fail to realize that the wiki article you told me to look at has this gem:
Soviet Tank Strength in Battle: 5,128 tanks
Soviet Tank "Losses": 6,064
Yes, your article seriously retardedly claims that the Soviets ended the battle with negative 936 tanks. How again then, were the Germans stopped and not simply crushing the Soviets when they supposedly still had 2,500 tanks left? The Soviets didn't just have no tanks left, they had negative tanks left!
Really, your complete inability to not lie to yourself to support these insipid notions of German "10:1" superiority is clear for all to see; which just piles on top of your equally insipid claims that the SS were "very good soldiers" during the period when they were made up of ideological idiots whose tactical solution to everything was "frontal assault" to the bewilderment of the Russians who simply machine-gunned them to death in streetfighting and to the face-palming rage of the Wermacht regulars who couldnt' believe they were being told to hand over a disproportionate amount of replacement equipment to these Himmler fanboys.
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Wrong. Tank losses (which again are understated) was already at 6000/year by 1943 and never went down. The only honeymoon for the Germans was the early days of 1941 when they were shooting up unprepared Soviet units with no ammunition. And even by the end of that year we're talking about a German army that lost almost all of the 3,000 tanks it had started the campaign with, along with a million casualties. Heck, nobody is even sure how bad the German losses in 1945 really were anymore because most units stopped bothering to keep count; everyone was relying on pick ups of boys and old men, and the SS fanatics who still wouldn't accept reality were busy shooting their own men in numbers that even Soviet Commissars would find excessive.
The simple reality is that the sources claiming 3:1 or 4:1 annual kill ratios in favor of the Germans count the massacre of Soviet POWs and civilians as part of the German kill count. The Wermacht was only particularly good at killing when the enemy can't fight back.
What's with all the Nazi-wanking going on? Tactically the Soviets made many mistakes, but operationally they far outclassed the Germans. Who cares how many Soviet tanks were lost at Prokhorovka? The point is they blunted the German advance, and the Germans threw away a huge number of men and material on a pointless offensive. I personally don't think Vatutin is as good as, say John Erickson makes him out to be but he was still a highly competent general.
Is bringing up reinforcements 'cheating' now?
As for the 3rd Kharkov, that was to large extent due to Stalin and Vatutin greatly overestimating how capable their troops were at that moment. Manstein brought up fresh elite units against tired and worn out Soviet units who had been on the offensive for around two or so months. And the SS units still took heavy casualties clearing Kharkov itself.
It's indeed very easy to say "who cares about tank losses" when you get 12.000 tanks, 20.000 planes and 400.000 trucks for free via L&L. When we're only comparing Germany and the Soviets and who would've won without outside interference, then you'd have to deduct the L&L shipments (Germany's allies can be ignored if you count in the German troops that had to garrison Western Europe).
Without the massive L&L though, the Soviets couldn't have simply replaced any lost vehicle and plane. They would still have slightly outproduced Germany, but they lost way more than that difference.
It would still have been possible for Germany to beat the Soviets, but in order to achieve that the campaigns would have had to be almost flawless. Heinz Magenheimer (Austrian historian) wrote some good books about the biggest blunders during Barbarossa. Without L&L German victory would have been very likely IMHO.
The whole plan was rather odd case since it also relied on the idea there are no major delays and it was formulated pretty much on the spot with no real preparations. XXX Corps vanguard did not reach Eindhoven's outskirts until late 17th and the rest only the following morning instead of the few hours planned ETA. Add traffic issues and trouble galore. After all, even with the WSS troops resting and refitting in Arnhem if we assume there was no trouble at the border (and the opposite of course happened) and XXX Corps could've just driven all the way to Nijmegen without major delays by say, late 18th or early 19th, the situation could have turned out to be completely different. By the time Arnhem bridge was done with they were still stuck between Eindhoven and Nijmegen.
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German casualty reporting is one of the weirdest things to read through. Jentz's "Panzertruppen" has some great moments with lots of documents cited, with some Panzer units reporting no losses while at the same time complaining they have no tanks left. My favourite part tis the overall vs operational panzers graph for 1943. Looking at total panzers everything is great! German Panzer strength only drops by 100 tanks by the end of zitadelle! A "slight" problem is that operational panzer numbers drop by about a half in the space of 20 days. But I guess it's Ok, as they re not recorded as casualties.
The trend continues throughout the Soviet counteroffensive. Total panzers go down only slightly, operational panzers plummet to reach only 600 operational Panzers by the end of September (note: not including SPGs so actual numbers are a somewhat higher) and not recovering to anything remotely resembling Kursk levels.
However, the best part is when we compare the overall production figures. The Germans were producing around 1000 AFV/month in 1943 and the panzer strength was dropping. The Soviet production+LL shipments averaged them at 2,250 tanks per months and their tank strength was increasing. So yeah, the Germans had so tiny casualties, one might wonder why their operational panzer numbers plummeted despite 1000 AFV/month they were getting.
By 1945 the German nation was just crumbling and millions of german soldiers were surrendering. In the last couple of months and weeks about 4 million surrendered to both USSR and the western allies. So a lot of the german losses you calculate were losses after the fact. As in the war was practically over.
The offensive capability of the Soviets was very limited for years. In fact if it was anyway useful they would have won the war quickly and should have. THe soviet army should have been in berlin in April 1942 not 45 if we went by your analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Offensive This is an example of what I mean, (side note why weren't those troops redeployed to defend the area around berlin?!)
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Surely there must be a way to counter another person's figures and/or claims without resorting to using terms like retarded, stupid and so on.
I'd like to think the people in this thread are capable of doing so. So, let's just do that from this point on.
I don't want to close this down as I like reading about WW2 generals.
I'd like to think the people in this thread are capable of doing so. So, let's just do that from this point on.
I don't want to close this down as I like reading about WW2 generals.
Won´t beat a dead horse, but while I think that people that think extremes like Soviets being able to win even if UK had signed Peace in 1940 are totally crazy, LL wasn´t THAT important in the most critical part of the war which was 1941 and 42. No LL would mean more casualties for the russians, and maybe not even that if no LL meant an opening of a second front earlier.
Also if by blunders you mean stuff like focusing Moscow, the what if was discussed extensively by the likes of David Glanz which totally disagrees, by saying that leaving a huge soviet army on the right flank of the advance (in Kiev) of na overextended army would be very stupid. And it´s hard to disagree.
Also let´s return to the topic which is generals, not tanks.
The Soviets were recieving a huge amount of lend-lease in 1941 and 42. On top of that, Lend Lease provided a huge number of Transports (including trains) and AFVs to the Soviets. Overall though, I think the most important aspect of Lend Lease was the food, an army marches on its stomach and without food the Soviet army could have completely collapsed.
In total, the US deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans); 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras) and 1.75 million tons of food.
Didn´t say it didn´t exist. Just saying that no LL = defeat is a dubious claim. Specially because in 1941 the material wasn´t exactly huge.
Back to topic
Back to topic
To regroup and refocus on generals -- I would like to second Yamashita for not only his conquest of Singapore but also for his defense of the Japanese position in the Phillipines. Despite arriving on the scene less than a month before the US invasion to retake the Phillipines and fighting against an overwhelming US superiority (troops, air support, supply, navy and very importantly local population support {the Japanese by this time in the war were regarded by the local population as brutal occuppiers}) Yamashita army assumed a defensive posture and managed to tie up a strong US army for months. When the war finally ended about half his original force managed to march out of their positions and go home. This is in sharp constrast to McArthur who had years to prepare for a similar strategic situation (with the exception that the US was never as unpopular with the Fillipinos as the Japanese) and managed to get stuck in Bataan without adequate supplies or a plan and then got defeated by second line Japanese troops. The fact that Yamashita was convicted or war crimes and executed now is more documentation of the lack of adequate judicial processes/evidence in the trials than it is an indictment of his behavior or responsibility (although the crimes themselves were clearly committed).
As a general, he was superb in both offense and defense.
Yeah Yamashita was really a one of a kind in the Japanese army.
He was a thorn in the eye of the government because he said what he wanted.
And asked why he didn't commit suicide like many other high standing officers in Japanese army he replied "Why should I? I have not been defeated. I have simply obeyed my Emperor`s orders to surrender. I could have kept on fighting."