Night Distribution Percentage

[76mm]

In WWII, the emphasis was placed on smaller units and managing those, at least in the more "modern" forces. Greater availability of flares and star shells would make navigation at night easier.

Depending on the conditions, night assaults would still be chaotic, but a WWII platoon/company commander would have an easier job of managing it than a WWI battalion commander whose tactical options are limited to sending his men from point A to point B. I expect identifying the enemy at night would also be more difficult in early WWI, due to the large number of men running around and the similar uniforms and weaponry.

Interesting, but I consider these same factors the reason why WWII would not be any easier than WWI: both your own units and the enemy are more dispersed, making it more difficult to command your own units and find those of the enemy. Simply moving from Point A to Point B at night is hard enough, anything more ambitious invites chaos. See my point below...

What situations where night assault rules are a problem do you run into where the problem comes from mechanics related to nighttime warfare and are not caused primarily by, say, a difference in quality?

I just think that the difficulty of conducting night attacks is grossly underestimated (actually I should say night operations rather than attacks, but the night movement disruption rules adequately address non-combat stuff). The loss of situational awareness at night--even for highly-trained units--is very severe. Except in unusual circumstances (full moon, open terrain), it is much harder to tell where you are, or where the enemy is...while you *usually* can see the squadmate in front of and/or behind you, forget about seeing the next squad, much less platoon. And I would think that illumination aids such as starshells, etc., would generally be of more use to the defender, because for the attacker to use them when they were most needed--during the approach--would be to lose the advantage of surprise.

Generally IMHO I think it is natural that night assaults would be much more disruptive than night moves, and so it doesn't make much sense to me that night moves are penalized but not night assaults.

Finally, all I can say is that I was in an M1 tank platoon back in the day, with thermal sights, etc--and even then night operations were not exactly easy, although we did (usually!) succeed in avoiding total chaos. That said, even then our night operations were generally in areas that we knew relatively well, and doing the same in an unfamiliar area would presumably have been even more challenging.