Red Devils over Arnhem AAR - Allied side

[jimcarravallah]

I agree Jim.

I have just finished reading Blood Red Snow.
Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front; by Gunter Koschorrek.
Fantastic book, about a young German heavy machine gunner, but its a very harrowing read.
Don't read it if you need cheering up, but for an alternative view on what its like to be on the losing side, for a soldier on the front line, its an amazing insight into what their life was like and what they had to endure.

A good friend from my work, who was an Armor Master Gunner instructor for the Army, a veteran of the combat in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, recommended _The Forgotten Soldier_ by Guy Sajer, published in 1965, if I wanted some details regarding what combat was like for a person serving in the military.

It grew out of a conversation we were having regarding what soldiers had to endure in addition to operating an airborne delivered, air droppable tank (M8 Armored Gun System) I was helping to develop logistics support for during its research development phase. The issue was how much of a cognitive burden a soldier could bear while looking at the information displays and operating the controls to fight the tank (called MANPRINT in the US DoD).

The book painted a pretty stark picture of war for a young soldier from Alsace drafted into the German Army and sent to fight on the Eastern Front with the Grossdeutschland Division and then shifted back and forth from East to West to combat following Normandy invasion and then to protect the German borders.

I've since seen some criticism of the book's authenticity, but given that Sajer was less than inspired to learn about Nazi dogma, and wasn't a far up in the command chain, there could be some confusion regarding places and military rules that got confused in the 20 years after the war ended.

 

[jimcarravallah]

At a first glance this game might seem far removed from any of the fighting and the hardship of battle. Yet once you really get into a scenario and indeed start writing an AAR you get bonded to your units. These are no throwaway units, which you can spawn again later on. These are companies, battalions, divisions... that actually existed and that have a background and reputation. These counters are men...

That is one of the things I really like about this game. You have your order of battle and that's it. You cannot magically produce units in barracks or tanks in factories like in other games. It makes you cherish your units. Because once they're gone, they're gone. It is tough losing units that you got bonded to, units that did their best and showed real valour.

I was an Army logistician until 2009, and another thing I will attest to is the fidelity of the logistics support during game play.

I'd say it's 90-percent accurate in terms of what units deployed in the field are expected to experience in combat based on the planning parameters I used to develop logistics support for new vehicle systems and insert them into the Army structure.

There was significant effort under CO1 to improve the delivery system, and working with the development team, we came up with some pretty good methods to establish realistic supply routing from the combat bases to supported units.

My interest in the game is from experience I had with the Army supporting a realistic logistics simulation suite that would be added to combat officer training simulations to allow them to experience the impacts on combat from the variables that affect resupply efforts. CO2 doesn't have all the computing power necessary to address all the parameters in the training simulations, but it does a good job with the major ones that can be addressed under the computer memory and display requirements.

 

[Kurt]

You have done an impressive job with the supply system in CO , best I have seen in a game/simulation ." Forgotten Soldier " good read also .

 

[jimcarravallah]

You have done an impressive job with the supply system in CO , best I have seen in a game/simulation ." Forgotten Soldier " good read also .

Credit the programmers.

They were willing to listen, and work out the parameters within the latitude they had to change the programming.