Atheory's Project: Operation Fischreiher (Stalingrad42)

[Plain Ian]

You have a magic wand that allows you to create all those nice graphics, admit it.  

The letters M and T in Cyrillic are probably the primary example of confusion due to italic or upright script in our hobby.

The italic form of the letter M, for some form of mechanized or motorized unit in our case, is a capital M.

The italic form of the letter T, for some form of tank unit in our case, is a lower case m.

The Guards indication in Latinized form of the Cyrillic letters reads "rb", which in that alphabet means "gv" for Gvardeyskiy.

Though I've been looking at Soviet maps and OOB's for years, I still need to double-check unit types/names often enough due to it being unclear if it's a capital or lower case m due to low image quality or a fold in the map.

Graphics no problem. Typing and spelling big problems. Here's another Excel graphic to look at.



Ok so here is a very rough comparison of 3 front line Russian Rifle Divisions against a standard German Infantry Division with a Jaeger Division and Italian Infantry Division also thrown in for comparison.

As I said it’s very rough and basically just totals the attack factors (hard/soft) multiplied by number of systems (men/gunsx10) to arrive at some sort of attack strength. Morale was ignored but I guess I could factor this in later.

No attempt was made to calculate a defense strength as I’ve no idea what to do for this?

So roughly the weakest Rifle Division the Russians field is one fifth the strength of a standard German Division whilst the best Rifle Division is almost one third.
Interestingly the Jaeger Division comes out quite well even though it has only 6 Battalions compared to the 9 in a standard German division. The fact that the battalions are 600 men versus 525 probably helps.

The Italian unit was a bit of a surprise.  I expected it to be low but it did have a nice integral A/A unit, although I haven’t checked to see how much air the Russians get in this scenario. Its artillery isn’t really that bad apart from the fact it is short ranged. Surprisingly it is all motorised. German units are still using horses for their 155cm guns!  

The Italian Division’s A/T capability is actually the same as a standard German Division???  In theory I would expect this unit to be able to cope with a Russian Rifle Division even though it has only 6 manouever units (ignoring the Pioneer Coy) against the Russians 10. (include the Sapper Bn).

Incidentally one of the Italian Cavalry groups starting on the map is called Barnabo? Should this not be Balbo?