SteveMcClaire
Posts: 4472
Joined: 11/19/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheReal_Pak40 * Mk III, IV, Tigers I & II in the appropriate battle groups as noted in INSinSept * There were at least a couple of 6 lb AT guns at Arnhem Bridge * Can the BG sizes be enlarged? It's quite unrealistic to only fight for Arnhem Bridge with a small handful of units. * unit cost system in the stock GC completely prohibits actually purchasing an expensive item such as an AT gun or 80mm morter unless you trade in half or more of your current force. All the equipment you list are in the existing Battle Groups and Force Pools. Pz III, IV, and VI E are in KG Knaust. sPzAbt 506 has its own BG for the Tiger IIs. Every British airborne battle group has some 6pdr and/or 17pdr guns in their FP. What you actually have available depends a lot on your difficulty setting. At the harder difficulties you will typically not get rare units in your FP (where there was only 1 or 2 in a whole battalion, or larger, formation.) Some unit types only appear in the FP after certain dates -- the Pz III and IV tanks didn't join KG Knaust until the 19th, for example, so they won't appear in the FP until that date. If you'd like to maximize the amount of 'rare' kit you see (and get more points for buying them) you can play on a lower difficulty for both sides. For German OOB research, I went back to the original German records where they were available. Some additional information can be pieced together with records from Heeresgruppe B and various post-war "Foriegn Military Studies" papers written by German commanders for the US Army after the war. "It Never Snows in September" is a pretty good source, IMO. One thing to keep in mind is that Kershaw's charts, which show the organization of the German units, can lead you to overestimate the strength of many German formations. Where he will show a battalion with 3 companies on paper, the actual strength of the such a unit was often only 300 men or so (50% of full battalion strength, or less). "In the Firestorm of the Last Years of the War, II. SS-Panzerkorps with the 9. and 10. SS-Divisions 'Hohenstaufen' and 'Frundsberg'" by Wilhelm Tieke is a pretty good narrative covering II.SS Panzer Korps, but does not have a lot of details on specific strengths or equipment. Wehrkreis VI kept an accounting of the equipment and personnel that were sent into the field during Market-Garden, and these records are available on microfilm. Strength and equipment for KG Knaust and units in Korps Feldt were quite well detailed. The website http://www.sturmpanzer.com has some digitized microfilm of the original records for LXXXVIII Korps, which gives some specifics on equipment and strength for many of the formations involved in KG Von Tettau and the east side of the 1.Fallsch.Armee area of the corridor. One thing to keep in mind is that no source is 100% accurate, and that a lot of books about Market-Garden use earlier books are their primary sources, and thus mistakes are often repeated without being checked against the original records. This is why I tried to always find primary sources. For example, in "It Never Snows in September", Kershaw includes KG Roestel in the units facing the XXX Corps bridge head on September 17th. In fact this unit (10.SS Panzerjaeger Abt) was off fighting under AOK 7 at the time, as the records for Heersegruppe B show. Assault guns reported by the British in this area were actually StuGs (a period photo confirms a knocked out StuG III near Valkenswaard), most likely from 599.PzJg.Abt. A digital version of the Heeresgruppe B September KTB can be found here, if you're interested: http://members.home.nl/ron.mourmans/KTB%20H.Gr.%20B%20(SEPT%201944).pdf Cheers, Steve
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