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Gregor_SSG -> RE: AO Thoughts (1/29/2009 10:25:50 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Capitaine
My take on the new AO concept in Kharkov is generally very favorable. One thing that concerns me, though, is when it may come time to retreat/flee. I say this in the context of the experience I described playing the Soviets. I understand having formations committed to a rigid AO as long as the battle plan is intact, but if one must abandon the battle plan to save yourself, it's my sense that these endangered formations should be able to flee back into the safest area regardless of the AO. In my game, I had my units just stopped and entrenched at the arbitrary limit of the "red zone", unable to run further from the Nazi menace.
Thoughts?
What we need to consider here is that no officer in the Red Army was free to make military decisions without giving strong consideration to 'political' issues - political being understood in the broadest sense, as in 'office politics', except much more deadly.
Stalin's purges of the Red Army had taught, in blood, some vital lessons. One was that any deviation, no matter how trivial or reasonable, from the current party line was exceptionally dangerous. On the battlefield, this translated as 'any deviation from current orders', which was likewise fraught with danger.
Another lesson was that when things went wrong, blame would be allocated and punishment inflicted. Deviation from orders was a lightning rod for blame allocation and its consequences.
To reinforce these lessons, Stalin instituted dual command, with a Commissar, who had equal rank and authority, for each officer. In its strictest form, no order in the Red Army was valid unless authorised by both the Officer and his Commissar.
So lets imagine that you are a Soviet general on the southern front of Kharkov. The fascist invaders have just launched a major offensive on your hopelessly inadequate defences. You defend stoutly, of course, and try to alert HQ to the gravity of the situation, but they are slow to realise the truth of what is happening, and in any case, nobody has made a plan for such an eventuality.
You could, as the officer on the ground with the best picture of what's happening, exceed your current orders and order a general withdrawal to a more defensibe position, but you won't. Firstly, your Commissar would almost certainly not agree, and could try to have you arrested or even shot. Secondly, if you do manage to issue the order, everything that goes wrong between your position, and say Belgorod, will now be the fault of Comrade General Betrayer of the Motherland, who deliberately exceeded his clear orders, and so caused the disaster.
If you stay, the worst the Germans can do is shoot you, although the chances of that happening aren't high. Better to maintain your position until you are clearly surrounded, then commandeer the fastest available transport and make a midnight dash across the battlefield. If you do reach safety you report that you obeyed all orders to the last, and then heroically fought your way out of encirclement. Said encirclement only happened because formations either side of you gave way, otherwise you would still be repelling the fascist hordes from your original line.
Now obviously, a game at the Kharkov level cannot hope to model the messy and often undefined nature of high level command in a real battle, but the AOs do a very good job of modelling the *effects* of such decisions. So when Soviet forces are forced to commit militarily stupid acts, they are just following ample historical precedent, and recreating an inevitable outcome of the Soviet command ethos.
Gregor
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