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Tête de Porc -> Love the remake, but one major error (2/11/2007 2:50:51 AM)
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First let me say that I played the Close Combat series to death and am very excited about the remake. The game still has lots of potential, and it looks like you're on the right track.
Now over to the complaining. In the release notes it says that
quote:
To properly understand a subtle weakness in the developer provided teams, players must realize that there is a clear difference in the design concept of the German team mix and the Russian team mix. This design mix is in part related to the "doctrine" that each army was designed around during WW2. [...]
Unlike the German Army, the Soviet Army was patterned around an "experience" concept. All units were considered normal and equal. As units gained in combat experience, they would be promoted to "Guards" status and ultimately to "Desant" status to indicate their level of expertise. Guards and Desant units almost always had first choice for refit and reissue when new equipment became available.
This is, to the best of my knowledge, incorrect. Soviet airborne units were not promoted from Guards status, they were recruited and trained as specialized airborne units right from the start just like their Western and German counterparts. (In fact even the Guards title was not always earned via promotion. Some units were given Guards status from the beginning.)
I found an internet source that does a pretty good job of explaining the confused history of Soviet airborne troops in WWII:
quote:
Despite being part of the Air Force, the 212th Airborne Brigade was deployed to the Far East and saw action in the Battle of Khalkin Gol against the Japanese Army in July and August 1939, while the 201st, 204th and 214th Airborne Brigades took part in the invasion of Poland during September 1939. The first full-scale combat jump in history occurred in November 1939 near Petsamo, Finland during the Russo-Finnish War and were again in action during the occupation of Rumanian Bessarabia. The reasonable success and good combat record, along with the success of the German Airborne forces in Western Europe meant that the five airborne brigades based in European Russia were earmarked to be expanded to corps status, while the sixth remained in the Far East.
When war broke out in June 1941, the technical assets of the VDV (Vozdushno-Desantnaya Voyska - Air Assault Force) were totally inadequate to start with, and what they had was devastated by the air attacks early on in the campaign. This shortage of air assets meant that the VDV spent most of the war fighting as elite infantry. A number of operations were conducted during the winter of 1942/1943 with the 201st Airborne Brigade dropping near Medzyn on the 2/3 January and again near Vyazma on the 18th January, with the 204th Airborne Brigade near Rzhev on the 14-22 February. An ambitious plan was formulated to drop the entire 4th Airborne Corps near Vyazma behind German lines at the beginning of February, but with the lack of air transport assets meant that the 22 TB-3s and 40 PS-84s would have to fly two or three sorties a night for a week. The Corps started dropping on the 27th January and about a quarter of them were dropped into terrible weather conditions and the operation foundered. Another operation later in the month against Yukhnov also failed.
These heroic but ineffective operations led the Soviet High Command to convert the Corps to Guards Rifle Divisions and they fought with distinction in the northern Caucasus and Stalingrad. Eventually however, the Air Force managed to have them reformed as Guards Airborne Divisions and a large scale operation was planned in September 1943 to drop and air-land 10,000 troops from the 1st, 3rd and 5th Airborne Brigades and establish a bridgehead over the Dniepr River. The operation, however was a costly failure.
As you can see there was a lot of back and forth, but it's evident that
- Soviet airborne divisions did perform combat jumps, i.e. the airborne designation was not just a honorific one
- airborne units were raised as such, i.e. they were not converted from rifle units. If anything the process went in the other direction, with airborne units sometimes converted to regular infantry units.
- there was no promotion path from regular to Guards to airborne. Some airborne units were not even designated as Guards.
The above is not that big a deal, but since the release notes state it as fundamental fact I think I should at least mention it.
The thing that's missing in the Russian army list is not really more elite units but the opposite, i.e. more poorly trained units. Raw militia units played a large part in the defence of Moscow and Stalingrad, for example.
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