The Competition & Teaser Thread

[ComradeP]

76mm, Stalingrad or any other sieges of major cities that were encircled or could not be given up according to high command for that matter are an exceptional case.

Normally, the majority of the troops will fight for self-preservation, which means they'll retreat as soon as they feel they're in serious danger. The lower the leadership quality, the earlier they retreat.

When encircled, that option isn't there. To paraphrase Sun Tzu: if you don't leave a route of retreat open, the enemy might very well fight to the death. Self-preservation suddenly means holding on tenaciously and hoping you'll be rescued/allowed to leave the city. The nature of urban combat also removes most of the advantages of training and leadership. It's always going to be chaotic and messy. Squad and platoon leaders become far more important than higher level leaders.

Encirclement battles tend to defy logic far more than regular military operations: men that are basically doomed will still often fight until the end instead of surrendering. The quality of the troops involved matters less than in the open. If all you're tasked with is defending an apartment building, it doesn't really matter if your battalion commander is a clueless idiot, or if his counterpart on the German side is a military genius.

In both world wars, the Germans fared poorly in attritional battles because their opponents could always throw more men in. Soviet forces in Stalingrad were being bled at alarming rates, but there were always more and Stavka carefully inserted just enough men to keep the Germans from capturing the city, it was a calculated gamble and it worked.

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David, a question about merging units: can support units only combine within their company or also within their battalion? In Moscow '42, infantry units could combine up to battalion level but the Panzers could combine into a full regiment for some reason, provided the units used the same tank type.