I'm busy painting up some Germans for Chain of Command to use in the rather excellent Blitzkrieg 1940 campaign supplement from Two Fat Lardies. Actually my "cunning plan" is to add to the stuff I already have for Stalingrad, as the infantry are pretty much interchangeable so all I need is some new (earlier) vehicles. This is turning out to be predictably more complicated than first envisaged, but that is something for a later post. All that got me thinking about how we wargamers value hard stats, and tend to disregard the soft ones.
I'm going to use two examples to explain this. The Char B, and the Douglas TBD Devastator.
The Char B is well regarded by history and wargamers. On the table top it is an absolute beast, with an excellent 47mm gun in the turret to engage armour, and a short barrelled 75mm howitzer in the hull to shoot softer targets. The 75 is rather strange in that it is fixed - you aim the gun by aiming the tank - actually the driver aims and fires the 75mm using a complex but quite responsive steering system. The Char B also has very heavy armour, particularly on the front. When we read about it, and French tanks in general, the usual comments are that the tanks are excellent but the French deployed them in "penny packets" which meant the Germans could concentrate their tanks and beat the French monsters piecemeal. You can't read about the Char B without getting the story of Captain Pierre Billotte and his attack at the village of Stonne, where his tank Char B1 "Eure" on it's own managed to break through the German positions and destroyed thirteen Panzers which he caught in a line on the main street, which seems to support the "good tank" theory. Bilotte said he ordered his hull gun to engage the last panzer while he used the turret gun on the lead one, and then having blocked both ends of the street with wrecks proceeded to work his way down the column, apparently taking 140 hits that bounced off his thick armour in the process, before calmly heading back to his start point.
This is a preserved Char B, actually in Stonne as a memorial to the battle.
Stirring stuff. The problem is, that really seems to be it. I've been reading through German reports and after a week or so of frustration, it seems pretty much that Billotte and his rampage is almost unique, and when we look at French tanks fighting German ones, even the mighty Char B, they are totally useless. Germans do lose lots of tanks, but not to French tanks. The French anti tank gunners and artillery both perform very well, but the tanks do almost nothing. So what about the penny packets? I really can't see any evidence this is the case. Billotte may have carried out his devastating lone ride on his own, but he started with a company of 7 tanks and managed to lose the other 6. In fact he is a good example of what went wrong as he was the Company Commander yet he got separated from the rest of his unit and due to the poor communications and some sort of brain fade he ends up on his own. Company Commanders really shouldn't do this. It is true that French tanks were often outnumbered, but even when they were not, they don't seem to have performed very well against other tanks.
The thing about the Char B however is that although the "hard" stats look good, gun, armour etc the soft stats, the things we don't really represent well in wargames, are awful. Really awful. These problems are twofold. Firstly visibility. All tanks have visibility problems, French tanks are probably the worse of the bunch because unlike everyone else the French didn't believe in turret hatches and instead fitted their tanks with a domed cupola. The Commander couldn't stick his head up to look around. Instead the French had doors in the back of the turret that the TC would have to squirm through to see outside. How bad this feature is cannot be over stressed. German accounts speak of Panzers simply driving past French tanks at ranges of 80-100 meters and the French apparently not even seeing them. If he did see something he then would have to get back in the turret to communicate with the crew, and that's when the real (second) problem starts.
This pic above shows a Char B being loaded onto a tank transporter at Saumur tank museum. You can clearly see the commanders rear turret "door \ seat".
The second problem is that the Commander isn't just the commander, he is also the gunner for the 47mm AND co ax MG. He also loads them. He is also supposed to command the tank, instruct the rest of the crew and if he is a platoon or Company Commander, direct the other tanks too. He doesn't have a seat in the turret either, unless he has the rear turret hatch open and he sits on the outside.
So let's talk through an engagement scenario. The commander is sat outside, protected a little from fire directly to his front by the bulk of the turret, but against shell splinters or anything approaching him from any other angle he is totally exposed. His B1 is advancing slowly - it's not a fast tank, and anyway unlike most tanks the driver cant get instructions about where to drive very well because the commander, on his turret door seat, can't see forward where the tank is driving. This may help explain the number of pictures of Char Bs abandoned in roadside ditches. How he communicates with the rest of the tank crew from that position is something of a mystery anyway. Hopefully he sees his target - so he quickly shimmies back into the turret - losing his view of the target in the process, and remember his tank is moving, and he has no seat, so he is getting thrown around inside a metal box banging his head on the walls no doubt. Now he has a choice - he can either rotate the turret - and at least here the APX turret is electrically powered, then lay the gun on target, or load the gun. On this last one he does have some help - there is a radio operator below him in the hull who can at least pass him the shells for his 47mm, and the gun is primarily an anti tank gun so choice of ammo is not that much of a problem. So he loads the 47mm AP the radio man has passed up to him - and then where is the target? He has three options. He can jump back out onto his turret door \ seat to get a fairly clear view, or he can use the rotating cupola and try to locate the target through the very narrow slits in it, or he can use the gunners sight. The best view is of course from the rear turret door, but there is a war going on out there. The view from the cupola is very limited, and the gunners sight is basically a telescope that has excellent focus but almost zero field of view. If he uses the cupola once he has located the target he must move out of that position into the gunner's position - losing the target again, but hopefully if he has got the turret lined up and both the target and his tank haven't moved far he can use the gunners sight and take the shot. If he misses, or more likely momentarily loses sight of the target when the gun goes off six inches from his ear, he has to reload, then re-acquire, aim then.....
So let's talk through an engagement scenario. The commander is sat outside, protected a little from fire directly to his front by the bulk of the turret, but against shell splinters or anything approaching him from any other angle he is totally exposed. His B1 is advancing slowly - it's not a fast tank, and anyway unlike most tanks the driver cant get instructions about where to drive very well because the commander, on his turret door seat, can't see forward where the tank is driving. This may help explain the number of pictures of Char Bs abandoned in roadside ditches. How he communicates with the rest of the tank crew from that position is something of a mystery anyway. Hopefully he sees his target - so he quickly shimmies back into the turret - losing his view of the target in the process, and remember his tank is moving, and he has no seat, so he is getting thrown around inside a metal box banging his head on the walls no doubt. Now he has a choice - he can either rotate the turret - and at least here the APX turret is electrically powered, then lay the gun on target, or load the gun. On this last one he does have some help - there is a radio operator below him in the hull who can at least pass him the shells for his 47mm, and the gun is primarily an anti tank gun so choice of ammo is not that much of a problem. So he loads the 47mm AP the radio man has passed up to him - and then where is the target? He has three options. He can jump back out onto his turret door \ seat to get a fairly clear view, or he can use the rotating cupola and try to locate the target through the very narrow slits in it, or he can use the gunners sight. The best view is of course from the rear turret door, but there is a war going on out there. The view from the cupola is very limited, and the gunners sight is basically a telescope that has excellent focus but almost zero field of view. If he uses the cupola once he has located the target he must move out of that position into the gunner's position - losing the target again, but hopefully if he has got the turret lined up and both the target and his tank haven't moved far he can use the gunners sight and take the shot. If he misses, or more likely momentarily loses sight of the target when the gun goes off six inches from his ear, he has to reload, then re-acquire, aim then.....
You can see where this is going. In this light the German stories of French tanks just stopping in the middle of a field and apparently allowing the panzers to just drive around at their leisure and shoot them in the rear starts to make sense. In comparison a PzIII has a three man turret. The Commander has a split hatch with rotating cupola. Even in combat he can drop the bulk of his body through the hatch and fight the tank "head up" to maintain visibility and situational awareness. He has internal communication with his crew via headsets and a throat mike. His job is to command his tank, and coordinate with the others in the platoon, nothing more. The gunner has nothing to do other than follow his commander's instructions til he locates the target, and then shoot. After each shot he can keep the target in his sights because the loader will load the gun for him. My money is on the panzer - every time. So what happened at Stonne?
To put this in context, Stonne was a very intense fight. The village changed hands 17 times in three days. French sources compared the close and vicious infantry fighting that took place there to Verdun in the First World War, and some Germans compared it to Stalingrad.
According to reports Billotte approached down the road and suddenly came face to face with this column of panzers at 30 meter range. Now at this point the story starts to sound a bit strange. I can believe he didn't see the panzers, given the problems with his tanks visibility, but it seems a stretch that they didn't see him in his rather large tank. It also seems strange that he could order his driver to do the "shoot the rear tank" trick and shoot a tank thirteen tanks down a column when at the same time the panzers cant just turn around and drive away? Are they really parked nose to tail in the middle of a battle? If they are - how do you shoot the thirteenth - surely the line of fire s blocked by all those parked panzers?? Remember, the Char B cant fire the 75mm on the move............. It just seems strange. I also can't find any German reports that directly corroborate this event, though they do note the loss of 25 tanks in the three day battle. This map claims to show the route taken by Billotte, and if it's accurate, his gunner could not see the other end of the column.
Here is the village today on Google Earth - the road layout remarkably unchanged from 1940 though many of the buildings that lined the road have now gone.
Maybe not all the tanks claimed were killed on the day, maybe some are victims of the earlier battles and get included in the total anyway? Then again, if the Germans do sit it out and try and shoot the Char B in the face their chance of success isn't that high. I also wonder how much the Bonny Tyler factor kicked in. At the end of WW2 France was very much a country riven by internal division and self doubt. After the disaster of 1940 there was a great deal of finger pointing and scapegoating. In some ways this is still happening today, with various explanations being offered for the French collapse in 1940. This is understandable, and a nation in such a position, as Bonnie famously said "Needs a Hero". Billotte is a great candidate, a dashing tank commander who also happened to be the son of a high ranking general (sorry I forgot to mention that).
My second example is a plane that all wargamers know is a pile of crap - the Douglas TBD Devastator, a byword for mediocrity.
In two major engagements in 1942 the Devastator Squadrons achieved almost precisely zero (pun intended) and lost the vast majority of their planes in doing so - losses at Midway topped 90%. Actually that's a bit unfair as the TBDs did manage to cripple the light carrier Shoho at Coral Sea, but.....
The problem is when you look at the hard stats the TBD isn't that bad. OK it is certainly slow, particularly in comparison to Japanese aircraft or land based planes, but this can also be compared with the British Fairy Swordfish, an antiquated biplane that still managed to give useful service through WW2 and accounted for damaging \ sinking several battleships and 20 odd submarines, and the Swordfish makes the Devastator look decidedly sprightly. Why did it do so badly?
The answer is, really, it didnt. At Midway there were six new TBF Avengers based on the island. The Avenger is acclaimed as one of the better torpedo planes of WW2. but they lost 5 out of 6 trying to attack the Japanese fleet, and achieved no hits. This pattern is repeated regularly with torpedo bombers throughout the war - against any sort of fighter opposition they simply fail to perform, to the extent that in the USN retired most torpedo squadrons or converted them to bombing units. To some extent the Japanese are the exception, their superbly trained crews pushed their Kates through to point blank range before dropping, but also suffered crippling losses in the process so they simply could not do it again.
I think the Devastator's bad rep is therefore not really to do with a measurable deficiency in equipment or capability, the "hard" stats, but more about the environment and circumstances they were deployed in, the "soft" factors we find hard to represent in our games. Char Bs have good "hard" stats but lousy "soft" ones, so do much better in games than their real performance would justify, Devastators are seen as a disaster without recognising that any plane that has to fly low, slow and in a straight line to make an attack will get mauled by an even vaguely capable defence
My second example is a plane that all wargamers know is a pile of crap - the Douglas TBD Devastator, a byword for mediocrity.
In two major engagements in 1942 the Devastator Squadrons achieved almost precisely zero (pun intended) and lost the vast majority of their planes in doing so - losses at Midway topped 90%. Actually that's a bit unfair as the TBDs did manage to cripple the light carrier Shoho at Coral Sea, but.....
The problem is when you look at the hard stats the TBD isn't that bad. OK it is certainly slow, particularly in comparison to Japanese aircraft or land based planes, but this can also be compared with the British Fairy Swordfish, an antiquated biplane that still managed to give useful service through WW2 and accounted for damaging \ sinking several battleships and 20 odd submarines, and the Swordfish makes the Devastator look decidedly sprightly. Why did it do so badly?
The answer is, really, it didnt. At Midway there were six new TBF Avengers based on the island. The Avenger is acclaimed as one of the better torpedo planes of WW2. but they lost 5 out of 6 trying to attack the Japanese fleet, and achieved no hits. This pattern is repeated regularly with torpedo bombers throughout the war - against any sort of fighter opposition they simply fail to perform, to the extent that in the USN retired most torpedo squadrons or converted them to bombing units. To some extent the Japanese are the exception, their superbly trained crews pushed their Kates through to point blank range before dropping, but also suffered crippling losses in the process so they simply could not do it again.
I think the Devastator's bad rep is therefore not really to do with a measurable deficiency in equipment or capability, the "hard" stats, but more about the environment and circumstances they were deployed in, the "soft" factors we find hard to represent in our games. Char Bs have good "hard" stats but lousy "soft" ones, so do much better in games than their real performance would justify, Devastators are seen as a disaster without recognising that any plane that has to fly low, slow and in a straight line to make an attack will get mauled by an even vaguely capable defence
So there you go, some musings on hard and soft stats and factors that maybe we should be more aware of. There are many other examples, equipment that has a bad reputation with gamers (Sherman) but were loved by their crews because they were easy to live and work in.
All of which wont help when that bloody Char B rolls down the road, but at least I can say in "real life" it would probably just have been abandoned in the nearest ditch.
Cheers
One of the most interesting posts I've read in a long time. I was very surprised by the Char B story since I live in France and had previously swallowed the tale of msr Billotte's success hook line and sinker. Having seen the maps you've provided I cannot help but agree with your analysis that the outcome was extremely unlikely. Still I'm surrounded by people who will argue that Napoleon never actually lost Waterloo so there's that. As you say...France needed a hero.
ReplyDeleteThanks - as I say, I don't wish to cause offence, but I do think we should be able to question. In the same way, Britain gave out 11 VCs for the action at Rourkes Drift, but how many of those would have been granted if there had been no disaster the day before.
DeleteVery interesting. I have heard of course about the "great" Char B and as you say, how the French squandered them away. Never heard of Captain Bilotte. Very interesting read.
ReplyDeleteThanks. The Battle of Stonne is really worth reading up on, even if you exclude Bilotte. It gives lie to the often spoken idea that France collapsed and the French didn't want to fight.
DeleteInteresting article, Ken.
ReplyDeleteA useful bit of map research too, challenging the orthodox view.
The same argument can be made with the Israeli Defence Force and the Centurion, until they gripped the situation and started training properly on gunnery and maintenance. Of more relevance perhaps was the "88" vs 3.7" AA story - Germany mopped up on the frontline but lost heavily logistically in the Western Desert through lack of AA assets, Britain had an arguably better gun for anti-tank use, but employed it in its intended role. As an aside, did you hear the recent programme on use of stimulants at Alamein?
Regards, Chris.
Regards, Chris